Beautiful Code

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.

Table of Contents

1. A Regular Expression Matcher
2. Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface As Ontology
3. The Most Beaut iful Code I Never Wrote
4. Finding Things
5. Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order): Lessons from Designing XML Verifiers
6. Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty Through Fragility
7. Beautiful Tests
8. On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing
9. Top Down Operator Precedence
10. The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count
11. Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom
12. Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl
13. The Design of the Gene Sorter
14. How Elegant Code Evolves with Hardware: The Case of Gaussian Elimination
15. The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design
16. The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together
17. Another Level of Indirection
18. Python’s Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People
19. Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy
20. A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA’s Mars Rover Mission
21. ERPS: Designing for Maximum Adaptability
22. A Spoonful of Sewage
23. Distributed Programming with MapReduce
24. Beautiful Concurrency
25. Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander
26. Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software
27. Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way
28. Beautiful Debugging
29. Treating Code As an Essay
30. When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World
31. Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop
32. Code in Motion
33. Writing Programs for “The Book”

About the Authors

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.