Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Paperback)

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:

Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan, shows how deep insight into a language and a problem can lead to a concise and elegant solution.

Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel, starts with a well-chosen abstraction and demonstrates its unifying effects on the system's further development.

Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley, suggests how to measure a procedure without actually executing it.

Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray, draws together many strands in Computer Science in an exploration of a problem that is fundamental to many computing tasks.

Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers, by Elliotte Rusty Harold, reconciles the often conflicting goals of thoroughness and good performance.

Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility, by Michael Feathers, presents an example that breaks the rules and achieves its own elegant solution.

Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia, shows how a broad, creative approach to testing can not only eliminate bugs but turn you into a better programmer.

Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold, drops down a level to improve performance while maintaining portability.

Chapter 9, Top-Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford, revives an almost forgotten parsing technique and shows its new relevance to the popular JavaScript language.

Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem.

Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users.

Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data.

Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers.

Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination, by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software packages, to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of new computing architectures.

Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN's widely used mathematical library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time.

Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman, explains how many efforts by different collaborators to solve different problems led to the successful evolution of a complex, multithreaded system.

Chapter 17, Another Level of Indirection, by Diomidis Spinellis, shows how the flexibility and maintainability of the FreeBSD kernel is promoted by abstracting operations done in common by many drivers and filesystem modules.

Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling, explains how a careful design combined with accommodations for a few special cases allows a language feature to support many different uses.

Chapter 19, Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy, by Travis E. Oliphant, takes you through the design steps that succeed in hiding complexity under a simple interface.

Chapter 20, A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission, by Ronald Mak, uses industry standards, best practices, and Java technologies to meet the requirements of a NASA expedition where reliability cannot be in doubt.

Chapter 21, ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability, by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, shows how a powerful ERP system can be developed with free software tools and a flexible architecture.

Chapter 22, A Spoonful of Sewage, by Bryan Cantrill, lets the reader accompany the author through a hair-raising bug scare and a clever solution that violated expectations.

Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, describes a system that provides an easy-to-use programming abstraction for large-scale distributed data processing at Google that automatically handles many difficult aspects of distributed computation, including automatic parallelization, load balancing, and failure handling.

Chapter 24, Beautiful Concurrency, by Simon Peyton Jones, removes much of the difficulty of parallel program through Software Transactional Memory, demonstrated here using Haskell.

Chapter 25, Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander, by Kent Dybvig, shows how macros-a key feature of many languages and systems-can be protected in Scheme from producing erroneous output.

Chapter 26, Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software, by William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, applies a range of standard object-oriented design techniques, such as patterns and frameworks, to distributed logging to keep the system flexible and modular.

Chapter 27, Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way, by Andrew Patzer, demonstrates a designer's respect for his programmers by matching the design of a B2B web service to its requirements.

Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller, shows how a disciplined approach to validating code can reduce the time it takes to track down errors.

Chapter 29, Treating Code as an Essay, by Yukihiro Matsumoto, lays out some challenging principles that drove his design of the Ruby programming language, and that, by extension, will help produce better software in general.

Chapter 30, When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World, by Arun Mehta, takes you on a tour through the astounding interface design choices involved in a text editing system that allow people with severe motor disabilities, like Professor Stephen Hawking, to communicate via a computer.

Chapter 31, Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop, by TV Raman, shows how Lisp's advice facility can be used with Emacs to address a general need-generating rich spoken output-that cuts across all aspects of the Emacs environment, without modifying the underlying source code of a large software system.

Chapter 32, Code in Motion, by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, lists some simple rules that have unexpectedly strong impacts on programming accuracy.

Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes, explores the frustrations of solving a seemingly simple problem in computational geometry, and its surprising resolution.

Table of Contents

Foreword
by Greg Wilson

Preface

1. A Regular Expression Matcher
by Brian Kernighan

     The Practice of Programming

     Implementation

     Discussion

     Alternatives

     Building on It

     Conclusion

2. Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface As Ontology
by Karl Fogel

     Version Control and Tree Transformation

     Expressing Tree Differences

     The Delta Editor Interface

     But Is It Art?

     Abstraction As a Spectator Sport

     Conclusions

3. The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote
by Jon Bentley

     The Most Beautiful Code I Ever Wrote

     More and More with Less and Less

     Perspective

     What Is Writing?

     Conclusion

     Acknowledgments

4. Finding Things
by Tim Bray

     On Time

     Problem: Weblog Data

     Problem: Who Fetched What, When?

     Search in the Large

     Conclusion

5. Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order): Lessons from Designing XML Verifiers
by Elliotte Rusty Harold

     The Role of XML Validation

     The Problem

     Version 1: The Naïve Implementation

     Version 2: Imitating the BNF Grammar O(N)

     Version 3: First Optimization O(log N)

     Version 4: Second Optimization: Don't Check Twice

     Version 5: Third Optimization O(1)

     Version 6: Fourth Optimization: Caching

     The Moral of the Story

6. Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty Through Fragility
by Michael Feathers

     An Acceptance Testing Framework in Three Classes

     The Challenge of Framework Design

     An Open Framework

     How Simple Can an HTML Parser Be?

     Conclusion

7. Beautiful Tests
by Alberto Savoia

     That Pesky Binary Search

     Introducing JUnit

     Nailing Binary Search

     Conclusion

8. On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing
by Charles Petzold

9. Top Down Operator Precedence
by Douglas Crockford

     JavaScript

     Symbol Table

     Tokens

     Precedence

     Expressions

     Infix Operators

     Prefix Operators

     Assignment Operators

     Constants

     Scope

     Statements

     Functions

     Array and Object Literals

     Things to Do and Think About

10. The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count
by Henry S. Warren, Jr.

     Basic Methods

     Divide and Conquer

     Other Methods

     Sum and Difference of Population Counts of Two Words

     Comparing the Population Counts of Two Words

     Counting the 1-Bits in an Array

     Applications

11. Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom
by Ashish Gulhati

     The Heart of the Start

     Untangling the Complexity of Secure Messaging

     Usability Is the Key

     The Foundation

     The Test Suite

     The Functioning Prototype

     Clean Up, Plug In, Rock On . . .

     Hacking in the Himalayas

     The Invisible Hand Moves

     Speed Does Matter

     Communications Privacy for Individual Rights

     Hacking the Civilization

12. Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl
by Lincoln Stein

     BioPerl and the Bio::Graphics Module

     The Bio::Graphics Design Process

     Extending Bio::Graphics

     Conclusions and Lessons Learned

13. The Design of the Gene Sorter
by Jim Kent

     The User Interface of the Gene Sorter

     Maintaining a Dialog with the User over the Web

     A Little Polymorphism Can Go a Long Way

     Filtering Down to Just the Relevant Genes

     Theory of Beautiful Code in the Large

     Conclusion

14. How Elegant Code Evolves with Hardware: The Case of Gaussian Elimination
by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek

     The Effects of Computer Architectures on Matrix Algorithms

     A Decompositional Approach

     A Simple Version

     LINPACK's DGEFA Subroutine

     LAPACK DGETRF

     Recursive LU

     ScaLAPACK PDGETRF

     Multithreading for Multi-Core Systems

     A Word About the Error Analysis and Operation Count

     Future Directions for Research

     Further Reading

15. The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design
by Adam Kolawa

     My Idea of Beautiful Code

     Introducing the CERN Library

     Outer Beauty

     Inner Beauty

     Conclusion

16. The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together
by Greg Kroah-Hartman

     Humble Beginnings

     Reduced to Even Smaller Bits

     Scaling Up to Thousands of Devices

     Small Objects Loosely Joined

17. Another Level of Indirection
by Diomidis Spinellis

     From Code to Pointers

     From Function Arguments to Argument Pointers

     From Filesystems to Filesystem Layers

     From Code to a Domain-Specific Language

     Multiplexing and Demultiplexing

     Layers Forever?

18. Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People
by Andrew Kuchling

     Inside the Dictionary

     Special Accommodations

     Collisions

     Resizing

     Iterations and Dynamic Changes

     Conclusion

     Acknowledgments

19. Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy
by Travis E. Oliphant

     Key Challenges in N-Dimensional Array Operations

     Memory Models for an N-Dimensional Array

     NumPy Iterator Origins

     Iterator Design

     Iterator Interface

     Iterator Use

     Conclusion

20. A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission
by Ronald Mak

     The Mission and the Collaborative Information Portal

     Mission Needs

     System Architecture

     Case Study: The Streamer Service

     Reliability

     Robustness

     Conclusion

21. ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability
by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat

     General Goals of ERP

     ERP5

     The Underlying Zope Platform

     ERP5 Project Concepts

     Coding the ERP5 Project

     Conclusion

22. A Spoonful of Sewage
by Bryan Cantrill

23. Distributed Programming with MapReduce
by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat

     A Motivating Example

     The MapReduce Programming Model

     Other MapReduce Examples

     A Distributed MapReduce Implementation

     Extensions to the Model

     Conclusion

     Further Reading

     Acknowledgments

     Appendix: Word Count Solution

24. Beautiful Concurrency
by Simon Peyton Jones

     A Simple Example: Bank Accounts

     Software Transactional Memory

     The Santa Claus Problem

     Reflections on Haskell

     Conclusion

     Acknowledgments

25. Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander
by R. Kent Dybvig

     Brief Introduction to syntax-case

     Expansion Algorithm

     Example

     Conclusion

26. Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software
by William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt

     Sample Application: Logging Service

     Object-Oriented Design of the Logging Server Framework

     Implementing Sequential Logging Servers

     Implementing Concurrent Logging Servers

     Conclusion

27. Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way
by Andrew Patzer

     Project Background

     Exposing Services to External Clients

     Routing the Service Using the Factory Pattern

     Exchanging Data Using E-Business Protocols

     Conclusion

28. Beautiful Debugging
by Andreas Zeller

     Debugging a Debugger

     A Systematic Process

     A Search Problem

     Finding the Failure Cause Automatically

     Delta Debugging

     Minimizing Input

     Hunting the Defect

     A Prototype Problem

     Conclusion

     Acknowledgments

     Further Reading

29. Treating Code As an Essay
by Yukihiro Matsumoto

30. When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World
by Arun Mehta

     Basic Design Model

     Input Interface

     Efficiency of the User Interface

     Download

     Future Directions

31. Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop
by T. V. Raman

     Producing Spoken Output

     Speech-Enabling Emacs

     Painless Access to Online Information

     Summary

     Acknowledgments

32. Code in Motion
by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald

     On Being "Bookish"

     Alike Looking Alike

     The Perils of Indentation

     Navigating Code

     The Tools We Use

     DiffMerge's Checkered Past

     Conclusion

     Acknowledgments

     Further Reading

33. Writing Programs for "The Book"
by Brian Hayes

     The Nonroyal Road

     Warning to Parenthophobes

     Three in a Row

     The Slippery Slope

     The Triangle Inequality

     Meandering On

     "Duh!"-I Mean "Aha!"

     Conclusion

     Further Reading

Afterword
by Andy Oram

Contributors

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