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Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think 1st Edition

by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 100 ratings
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How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes.

This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.
This book contains 33 chapters contributed by Brian Kernighan, Karl Fogel, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Michael Feathers, Alberto Savoia, Charles Petzold, Douglas Crockford, Henry S. Warren, Jr., Ashish Gulhati, Lincoln Stein, Jim Kent, Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, Adam Kolawa, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Diomidis Spinellis, Andrew Kuchling, Travis E. Oliphant, Ronald Mak, Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, Bryan Cantrill, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Simon Peyton Jones, Kent Dybvig, William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, Andrew Patzer, Andreas Zeller, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Arun Mehta, TV Raman, Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, and Brian Hayes.
Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0596510047
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0596510046
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    July 31, 2007
  6. Part of series
    Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)
  7. Language
    English
  8. Dimensions
    7 x 1.41 x 9.19 inches
  9. Print length
    618 pages
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Greg Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security. He is the author of Data Crunching and Practical Parallel Programming (MIT Press, 1995), and is a contributing editor at Doctor Dobb's Journal, and an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (July 31, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 618 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596510047
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596510046
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.16 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.41 x 9.19 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 100 ratings

About the authors

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Previous page
  1. Travis E. Oliphant

    Travis E. Oliphant

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Travis has a Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University. Since 1997, he has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming, most notably as the primary developer of the NumPy package, and as a founding contributor of the SciPy package. He is also the author of the definitive "Guide to NumPy".

    Travis was an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU from 2001-2007, where he taught courses in probability theory, electromagnetics, inverse problems, and signal processing. He also served as Director of the Biomedical Imaging Lab, where he researched satellite remote sensing, MRI, ultrasound, elastography, and scanning impedance imaging.

    As CEO of Continuum Analytics, Travis engages customers in all industries, develops business strategy, and helps guide technical direction of the company. He actively contributes to software development and engages with the wider open source community in the Python ecosystem. He has served as a director of the Python Software Foundation and as a director of Numfocus.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Elliotte Rusty Harold

    Elliotte Rusty Harold

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Elliotte is originally from New Orleans to which he returns periodically in search of a decent bowl of gumbo. However, he currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife Beth and dog Thor. He's a frequent speaker at industry conferences including Software Development, Dr. Dobb's Architecture & Design World, SD Best Practices, Extreme Markup Languages, JavaWorld, and too many user groups to count. His fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Crossed Genres, and Daily Science Fiction in addition to numerous anthologies. His most recent books are Java Network Programming, 4th edition, and the JavaMail API, both from O’Reilly.

    See more on the author's page
  3. Greg Wilson

    Greg Wilson

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Dr. Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including "Beautiful Code", "The Architecture of Open Source Applications", and most recently "Software Design by Example". Greg is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator of the Year award.

    See more on the author's page
  4. Andrew Oram

    Andrew Oram

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book

    publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the

    company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source,

    networking, and software engineering, but his editorial output has

    ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic

    novel about teenage hackers. His work for O'Reilly includes the

    influential 2001 title Peer-to-Peer, the 2005 ground-breaking book

    Running Linux, and the 2007 best-seller Beautiful Code.

    Andy also writes often for O'Reilly's Radar site

    (http://radar.oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues

    related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation

    and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has

    appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright

    World, and Internet Law and Business. His web site is

    http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
100 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

P. Schwer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read for starting software engineer
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2007
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I am a software engineer of about 5 years of professional experience. The book is attractive to me because it describes proven best-practices for existing software. There are a large variety of software descriptions in this book. If you are looking for a programming-language-specific book, this book might not be for you, because it contains a wide variety of projects from different programming languages (from Fortran to Python and perl).

For the intermediate or beginning programmer, I'd say this is an excellent read as long as you are able to comprehend the material. Some of the text demands more than a cursory knowledge of programming. I will probably need to reread a few chapters later in my career in order to understand them in the manner they were intended.

The book reads like a book about software pattern implementations, but without the emphasis on the patterns. It is left to the reader to draw generalizations from the examples that they can apply to their own code.

Personally, I'd like to see more books like this. It provides a good frame of reference for the construction of good software.
5 people found this helpful
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Julian Richardson
5.0 out of 5 stars A lot of interesting material. Recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2013
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This is an interesting book. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly do not find all of the code featured in this book to be beautiful, but there is a lot of variety in the case studies which make up each chapter, and I think there is something for everyone here - as long as you have a reasonable amount of programming experience.
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Matt
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2018
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A gift for my son the programmer
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Leonardo Soto Munoz
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful indeed
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2009
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Enjoyed the book a lot. Not only contains really good solutions to a wide variety of problems: the core of the book are the explanations from the authors of each piece of beautiful code and why they think it is beautiful.

The better part is that each section is short enough to be read in one shot. Helps a lot on following the authors!
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Robert H. Stine Jr.
2.0 out of 5 stars It ain't all that beautiful...
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2008
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The editors of this uneven book give us 33 chapters from various, often well-known developers, in which these developers describe some code and explain why they think that it is beautiful. There are some gems, but it's not light reading and quite a bit of it is a real slog. If you are a professional programmer, it's probably worth the effort, but otherwise I'd steer clear.

And, in fact, all too much of the code is downright ugly. This starts, sadly enough, with the first example, by Brian Kernighan, describing a limited-capacity regular expression matcher.

Yes, THAT Brian Kernighan, a software god among men. But the example he describes as beautiful would be the last thing I would ever want in any software that I had to maintain. I am sure it is efficient, and it probably works, but the only beauty that I can see is that, if you convince yourself you understand why it works, you've also proven to yourself that your mental abilities put you in an elite category of coder. God help you if you need to modify the method's functionality or (shudder) debug it.

Another dubious entry in the book is by Adam Kolawa, who describes the CERN mathematical library. He claims that no library routine can be beautiful if it uses dynamic memory allocation. The software architecture he deems beautiful passes working memory, in the form of an array to the library routines, which in turn pass it on to their subroutines. In fact, the space used by the input parameters is reused to hold the solution. I am sure that CERN math library is an excellent package, but I would hate to have the job of tracking down bugs in a system in which all the subroutines in the stack were writing back into the same array.

Software ugliness can take many forms, as, for example, in the chapter by Ronald Mak, describing NASA software used for the Mars Rover mission. The solution for a highly reliable, long running, independent system? SOA, using Java 2 and J2EE EJBs. I am a big fan of Java and J2EE, but why on earth (or Mars!) would the Mars Rover system need EJBs? The SOA and EJB technology is at its best when coupling diverse databases and interacting with legacy systems. It brings with it a significant complexity and overhead. Why would anyone think this was appropriate for the Mars Rover?

For my taste, the worst of the worst was an article by R. Kent Dybvig, describing a program for analyzing code and detecting parameter name clashes. The code to be analyzed is in Scheme, a Lisp dialect. It's been awhile since I've fooled with LISP, but I was ready to give it a try. So here is an example of a macro that has potential scope issues, if there is a bound variable t elsewhere in the code:

(or e1 e2) -> (let ([t e1]) (if t t e2))

...and here is the refactored code, in which the problem is fixed:

(or e1 e2) -> (let [g e1] (if g g e2))

I stared dumbly at this for all too long a time until I read the next phrase, "in which 'g' is a generated (fresh) identifier". Here I'd fault the author for a really rotten presentation, and also for begging the question, since the whole problem he is purporting to solve is avoiding name clashes.

In fairness, the book also has many descriptions of genuinely beautiful code. I especially enjoyed the article by Charles Petzold on efficient image processing through code generated on-the-fly. Also, Henry Warren essay on devising efficient algorithms for counting the number of enabled bits in a bit string is fascinating. Yet another stimulating article is by Brian Hayes, who describes an efficient approach for determining if three points are co-linear. This article also uses LISP as the example language, but unlike Dybvig's piece, it's clear, and "porting" the approach to Java or C++ would be straight-forward.

In summary, "Beautiful Code" is a very mixed bag. On balance, it is probably worth reading, but without doubt it is a disappointment.
16 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Valerio Maggio
5.0 out of 5 stars Da avere nella propria libreria
Reviewed in Italy on June 30, 2013
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Testo da avere assolutamente nella propria raccolta personale: un manuale ricco di esempi illuminanti da cui apprendere e imparare ed espandere la propria visione delle cose ( per non are tutto troppo scontato in questo contesto oramai sempre più "off the shelf" )
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Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Insightful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 23, 2013
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This book takes you through several examples of what some top programmers consider beautiful code. As a by-product the book reads more like a collation of articles from a coder's version of Cosmopolitan magazine rather than a programmer's erotic novel. However I cannot complain about this as I did only by the book for a specific chapter. Simon Peyton Jone's article on "Beautiful Concurrency", it is a beautiful read, especially around Christmas time.

Enjoy!
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Lou
3.0 out of 5 stars Un peu court
Reviewed in France on November 12, 2015
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J'ai été un peu déçu par ce livre car il livre plutôt des témoignages que des exemples de code. Chaque chapitre renvoie à un projet logiciel qui se veut exemplaire, mais au final on n'apprend pas grand chose, c'est un long bavardage assez nombriliste.
2 people found this helpful
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PJ (London)
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 16, 2014
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A must read for developers
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A. Batllo
4.0 out of 5 stars Quite good and revealing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2010
Verified Purchase
I agree somewhat with what the other reviewers have said, but then you must take into account that there are 30+ authors here, and each one will have very different things to say and as many ways to say it. You could say that an editor should have taken care of equalizing the book, normalizing the styles, but I think that will destroy the spirit of it. It's true that there are many technologies and languages, but I don't think that is a mess, but the obvious result from putting together many great minds from different backgrounds and dealing with many different problems. It won't make you a better programmer, but I don't think that was the target of the book. This is not a cookbook or a book to teach you C++ in 21 days. This is something else. Think of it as an essay (or a collection of) or a documentary series. I still didn't read all articles, and because of the sheer variety and ample scope of the book, I will probably never read them all, but for sure I can tell you some of the chapters are also powerful motivators. With the daily corporate grind, you can get somewhat jaded sometimes with tech, but this is a foray into the joys of problem solving, the eureka moment, the pleasure of coding. For me, not a waste of time, definitely.
10 people found this helpful
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