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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 41 Ratings

Highly recommended - 2010-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
I think that the book completely pays off. Period.

The book describes a series of software projects in real-and-non-theoretical-terms. The amount of information per page is hard to improve.

Beautiful indeed - 2009-12-06
Reviewer Rating:
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!

Great inspiring read - 2009-09-04
Reviewer Rating:
The code described in this book really live up to the books title. Reading how this code was written is inspiring, even if the programming language it has been written in is not the one you program in yourself.

Excellent in Every Way - 2009-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
Great seller! Very prompt with delivery and product arrived just as described. Highly recommend doing business with this seller. Thank you!

Expect a lot of code and text intertwined in this book - 2009-03-30
Reviewer 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.

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