Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think

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. The book includes the following contributions: 'Beautiful Brevity: Rob Pike's Regular Expression Matcher' by Brian Kernighan, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University; 'Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology' by Karl Fogel, editor of 'QuestionCopyright.org', Co-founder of Cyclic Software, the first company offering commercial CVS support; 'The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote' by Jon Bentley, Avaya Labs Research; 'Finding Things' by Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, co-inventor of XML 1. 0; 'Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Validators' by Elliotte Rusty Harold, Computer Science Department at Polytechnic University, author of 'Java I/O, Java Network Programming', and 'XML in a Nutshell' (O'Reilly); and, 'The Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility' by Michael Feathers, consultant at Object Mentor, author of 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' (Prentice Hall). It also includes: 'Beautiful Tests' by Alberto Savoia, Chief Technology Officer, Agitar Software Inc; 'On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing' by Charles Petzold, author 'Programming Windows and Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software' (both Microsoft Press); 'Top Down Operator Precedence' by Douglas Crockford, architect at Yahoo! Inc, Founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON; 'Accelerating Population Count' by Henry Warren, currently works on the Blue Gene petaflop computer project Worked for IBM for 41 years; 'Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom' by Ashish Gulhati, Chief Developer of Neomailbox, an Internet privacy service Developer of Cryptonite, an OpenPGP-compatible secure webmail system; and, 'Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl' by Lincoln Stein, investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory - develops databases and user interfaces for the Human Genome Project using the Apache server and its module API. It also includes: 'The Design of the Gene Sorter' by Jim Kent, Genome Bioinformatics Group, University of California Santa Cruz; 'How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination' by Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, also distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Piotr Luszczek, Research Professor at the University of Tennessee; 'Beautiful Numerics' by Adam Kolawa, co-founder and CEO of Parasoft; and, 'The Linux Kernel Driver Model' by Greg Kroah-Hartman, SuSE Labs/Novell, Linux kernel maintainer for driver subsystems, author of 'Linux Kernel in a Nutshell', co-author of 'Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition' (O'Reilly). It also includes: 'Another Level of Indirection' by Diomidis Spinellis, Associate Professor at the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; 'An Examination of Python's Dictionary Implementation' by Andrew Kuchling, longtime member of the Python development community, and a director of the Python Software Foundation; 'Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy' by Travis Oliphant, Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University; and, 'A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASAs Mars Rover Mission' by Ronald Mak, co-founder and CTO of Willard & Lowe Systems, Inc, formerly a senior scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science on contract to NASA Ames. It also includes: 'ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability' by Rogerio de Carvalho, researcher at the Federal Center for Technological Education of Campos (CEFET Campos), Brazil and Rafael Monnerat, IT Analyst at CEFET Campos, and an offshore consultant for Nexedi SARL; 'A Spoonful of Sewage' by Bryan Cantrill, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he has spent most of his career working on the Solaris kernel; 'Distributed Programming with MapReduce' by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Fellows in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group; 'Beautiful Concurrency' by Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, key contributor to the design of the functional language Haskell, and lead designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC); and, 'Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case expander' by Kent Dybvig, Developer of Chez Scheme and author of the Scheme Programming Language. It also includes: 'Object-Oriented Patterns and a Framework for Networked Software' by William Otte, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Vanderbilt University and Doug Schmidt, Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering program, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University; 'Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way' by Andrew Patzer, Director of the Bioinformatics Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin; and, 'Beautiful Debugging' by Andreas Zeller, computer science professor at Saarland University, author of 'Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging' (Morgan Kaufman). It also includes: 'Code That's Like an Essay' by Yukihiro Matsumoto, inventor of the Ruby language; 'Designing Interfaces Under Extreme Constraints: the Stephen Hawking editor' by Arun Mehta, professor and chairman of the Computer Engineering department of JMIT, Radaur, Haryana, India; 'Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop' by TV Raman, Research Scientist at Google where he focuses on web applications; 'Code in Motion' by Christopher Seiwald, founder and CTO of Perforce Software and Laura Wingerd, vice president of product technology at Perforce Software, author of 'Practical Perforce' (O'Reilly); and, 'Writing Programs for 'The Book'' by Brian Hayes who writes the Computing Science column in American Scientist magazine, author of 'Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape'(W.W. Norton).

Author Biography:
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. Andy is also a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and writes often for the O'Reilly Network and other publications. Topics include policy issues related to the Internet and trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo. Andy works at the O'Reilly office in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lives nearby with his wife, two children, and a six-foot grand piano that can often be heard late at night. 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.