Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
from: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9780596510046
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0596510047
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 618
Publication Date: June 26, 2007
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Product Description:
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. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. tion.
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Rating:  -
Great seller! Very prompt with delivery and product arrived just as described. Highly recommend doing business with this seller. Thank you!
Rating:  -
My appreciation of Beautiful Code is like the one I have for the Justice League or the X-Men-- a band of exceptional individuals moving towards a common, altruistic end. (Proceeds of the the book will go to Amnesty International. ) This compendium of insightful essays and articles is edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson.
The talent of the contributors is undeniable and the text reminds me of the Algorithms class I took in college. The book relates how various software design architects and experts attack and solve problems while maintaining the elegance of the implementation. The range of topics include Perl, Haskell, Python and Ruby. This should give the enthusiastic developer a fresh and broad perspective on software. I have to mention that the book is developer oriented, so expect a lot of code and text intertwined.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The book hopefully will be able to give you a new way to look at software.
Rating:  -
Like others, I found the concept for this book intriguing, but in implementation, turned out to be a pretty significant borefest with little to no meaningful value that could be extracted from its contents. Disappointed - but I think I was doomed to be with my expectations of the book from its title and the plethora of respectable folks contributing.
Rating: -
I liked the idea of the book (real code, solving non-obvious problems), but it turned out to be a mixed bag in practice. 33 chapters, in different languages and at different levels. Some were pretty good and well worth reading; others not so much.
Unfortunately, I feel like I didn't learn all that much from this book - I'd already been exposed to just about all of the ideas presented therein. I think the problem most people are going to have with this book is: if you can read it without it being a hard slog, then you are experienced enough that you won't get that much out of it.
As another commenter has already said, a better plan might have been to have had a roundtable of programmers from different backgrounds to critique the designs and discuss how they might have looked using different languages. Now that could have been really interesting.
As it was, some of the presentations seemed distinctly un-beautiful, and the approaches taken raised ... Read More
Rating: -
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 ... Read More
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