A frequent topic of discussion among those in any technical field is for a short list of essential books that anyone worth their salt has read. With regards to software engineering, two classics quickly come to mind: Code Complete, and Design Patterns, as well as a recent publication joining the ranks of these epics, Beautiful Code by O'Reilly Press.
What makes Beautiful Code stand apart from the rest, is that it's format is so unconventional when compared to most other programming texts. The book is comprised of 33 Chapters, each written by a different author about a particular bit of code they had written and thought to be particularly eloquent. The best way to explain why this book is so wonderful is to make an analogy about the differences between learning something via a lecture as opposed to a private lesson. Most instructional books will take the lecture approach, where the author shows you one correct way to solve a problem, or complete a certain task and the reader must then digest that as best as possible. Beautiful Code is more like a private lesson in which the author of each chapter is giving the reader personalized attention by explaining their thought processes, how they arrived at each step, and occasionally showing some dead ends that didn't work out. Now consider that these private lessons are being given by such legendary names as Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold, and Yukihiro Matsumoto - and it becomes obvious why this is a must-have addition to any serious software engineer's bookshelf. Some particularly memorable sections include Karl Fogel's discussion on the origins and implementation of the Subversion Delta Editor and the look inside Google's MapReduce technology by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.
As stated earlier, one of the best strengths of this book is that it is language neutral. In each chapter, as the author is speaking from experience on a particular project, rather than writing a chapter for a hypothetical “Better Programming in Language XYZ”, you will see code snippets in C#, MSIL, Python, Ruby, and several other languages (There's even one chapter with Emacs Lisp!). This is important because the insight gained from this book will not be diluted from one language falling out of favor or into obsolescence, and allows for the possibility of this title being just as valuable ten years from now.
Many books will teach you how to solve a problem, but rare are those to teach you how to think. Beautiful Code is one of those select few, and will keep you coming back from project to project to consult its veteran sages of computer science. A worthy edition to any serious programmer's library, and hopefully a second volume is not far off.
|
