Reddit reviews Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory In Practice (O'reilly))
We found 24 Reddit comments about Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory In Practice (O'reilly)). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
O Reilly Media
Thank you all for your responses! I have compiled a list of books mentioned by at least three different people below. Since some books have abbreviations (SICP) or colloquial names (Dragon Book), not to mention the occasional omission of a starting "a" or "the" this was done by hand and as a result it may contain errors.
edit: This list is now books mentioned by at least three people (was two) and contains posts up to icepack's.
edit: Updated with links to Amazon.com. These are not affiliate - Amazon was picked because they provide the most uniform way to compare books.
edit: Updated up to redline6561
Aesthetics are almost never emphasized in university courses, but it's really important in practice. If you can write beautiful (i.e. readable/understandable, concise, efficient) code, you'll have a big leg up folks who bang out spaghetti code and pray it works.
Take a look at this book for famous 'beautiful' codes:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0596510047
If you're more interested in large scale software systems, dive into a widely used open source package and read the source. MySQL, Python, Hadoop, Rails, the complete Linux OS and many more are available for your autodidactic pleasure.
There's Beautiful Code
If you're going through decent books, then you shouldn't worry too much since most will cover what you need. Now, "school educated" programmers ... now they have knowledge gaps. Real world programming has taught me 99% of what I know.
That said, algorithms and data structures are a good foundation. Then programming patterns. Then read Beautiful Code.
Concurrency may be something to read up on too. Books teach this as well as professors do, but something that's overlooked by many people.
I have just the book for you.
There's a pretty good list at:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading-for-developers.html
Personally, I'd recommend the following:
First of all, this is an excellent post. I've seen so many questions posted here but yours is the most concise and upfront. I know exactly what your background is and so I'm more confident that what I want to suggest would actually be relevant.
You have solid industry experience with academic foundation. And I think you already are aware of the pitfalls of expert beginner (http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/). I think you are in a sweet spot where you can afford to invest resources without immediate gain - unlike early-career coders, you don't have to necessarily learn another language/framework right this second. You can afford to deepen your higher-level understanding of concerns and concepts that are timeless and not bound by the language/framework of the day.
I'd like to suggest you read other people's code/design. Here are some books to get you started.
Another thing you can invest in is everyday skills as a programmer. This is a classic on this subject.
You can couple ideas and tricks from here with any devops tools of the day to automate much of your workflow, such as bash/git/unix concepts onto automation tools such as docker/jenkins/ansible. Additionally, familiarizing/customizing your personal development environment. Improving scripting skills to automate many many things (practically everything that we do on computers that doesn't involve creative process are automatable. It's just a matter of ROI.).
http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047/
http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/programs.html
In Chapter 1 of Beautiful Code, "A Regular Expression Matcher," by Brian Kernighan (an early draft of which appears on Princeton's site), he writes "[Regular expression] first appeared in a program setting in Ken Thompson’s version of the QED text editor in the mid-1960s. In 1967, Thompson applied for a patent on a mechanism for rapid text matching based on regular expressions. The patent was granted in 1971, one of the very first software patents [U.S. Patent 3,568,156, Text Matching Algorithm, March 2, 1971]." That patent is viewable online here.
It's not proof that this is the first program that actually had it, but it's a good pile of evidence. I would like to hear of any examples prior to QED (which some sources leave out, claiming ed as the first to have them). I went on a hunt for previous examples once (before giving a class on regular expressions for my company; I didn't want to make unfounded claims), but could find nothing earlier.
My bookmarks (I'll organize them latter):
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Amazon.com: Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) (9780596510046): Andy Oram, Greg Wilson: Books
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Hacking: The Art of Exploitation is really inexpensive on Amazon in hard copy. Beautiful Code is also on par with the ebook on their site. I'm not entirely sure how the program works, but someone further down mentioned being able to register a hard copy that was purchased and get the ebook for $5. Probably worth looking into!
readscheme is a good place to start, it hasa a bunch of good links to papers on issues related to macros: http://library.readscheme.org/page3.html
(It also has lots of other material, but you asked about macros specifically, so that's the link I've posted.)
If you can buy one book, buy Lisp In Small Pieces. It's generally excellent, and has good coverage of macro implementation strategies.
http://www.amazon.com/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/dp/0521545668/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196347235&sr=8-1
Another good resource is the discussion of an implementation of syntax-case that's in "Beautiful Code": http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196346388&sr=8-1
The book (Beautiful Code)[http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047] has a great chapter (18) on Python dictionaries, how they work and how they fit into the language. Definitely worth the read.
The best way to learn to write great code is to read great code.
Check out Beautiful Code for a book on the subject.
Or, pick some of the most popular open-source projects on github and read through their code. Find some small utility functions and see how they implement them.
Or, post some of your own examples here on /r/learnprogramming or on stackoverflow and ask for tips on how to make your code cleaner.
As usual beautiful code is late.
More Power to Cut-And-Paste!
http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Explain/dp/0596510047
If you're looking for something to just read for fun, try *Beautiful Code.
"More focused" is the key point for me. I have a different opinion what that means, that's all.
See here for the following quote:
> The following subjects would be off-limits: Technology, devices, software, operating systems;
For me, operating systems are relevant to coding: they define the framework that I must navigate in order to get my code to do what it is supposed to. But I can find my OS-related programming content elsewhere, I don't need to have it present in /r/coding. But I would rather exclude too much than allow too much in - noise is distracting, and simplicity stimulates focus. If people really miss something, it will find its way in.
Regardless, I can recognize a losing battle - the idea of code reviews seems to have many supporters and few opponents, so it will happen anyway if someone wants to risk and endure not-so-constructive criticism, puns and potential fame on TheDailyWTF.
I think the whole idea will be short-lived. The comment threads will provide some helpful remarks (e.g. read Code Complete, Beautiful Books, or other books, learn about various algorithms and their computational complexity to figure out better approaches, etc.). The comments will become redundant after a while, and then people will realize that they are doing somebody's homework, and that learning good style is largely a self-study, and can't be passed on in a couple of sentences. And we'll have a new rule for "no newbie code reviews here".
But I've been proven wrong by Reddit many times before, so I won't bet on my version of events. So, who's gonna be the first one to submit code for a review?
As mentioned by this paper, “Beautiful Concurrency (PDF)”, Simon Peyton Jones' chapter in Beautiful Code is well worth the read.
I thought it was one of the best chapters in the book.
Beautiful Code is a great read with lots of interesting perspectives:
https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047
I believe there is always another best code waiting for you. But till yet I find the Jon Bentley's version of Quicksort in Beautiful Code pretty awesome. He describes it as "The most beautiful code I never wrote"
https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047/ref=sr_1_1
A couple of places you may want to look. I am sure others will have many more to look at:
http://martinfowler.com/books/
http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice/dp/0596510047
This reminds of the chapter on quicksort in Beautiful Code.