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.
I got my first job as a programmer in the summer of 1982. Two weeks after I started, one of the system administrators loaned me Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style (McGraw-Hill) and Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (Prentice Hall). They were a revelation—for the first time, I saw that programs could be more than just instructions for computers. They could be as elegant as well-made kitchen cabinets, as graceful as a suspension bridge, or as eloquent as one of George Orwell's essays.
Time and again since that summer, I have heard people bemoan the fact that our profession doesn't teach students to see this. Architects are taught to look at buildings, and com-posers study one another's scores, but programmers—they look at each other's work only when there's a bug to fix; even then, they try to look at as little as possible. We tell students to use sensible variable names, introduce them to some basic design patterns, and then wonder why so much of what they write is so ugly.
This book is our attempt to fix this. In May 2006, I asked some well-known (and not so well-known) software designers to dissect and discuss the most beautiful piece of code they knew. As this book shows, they have found beauty in many different places. For some, it lives in the small details of elegantly crafted software. Others find beauty in the big picture—in how a program's structure allows it to evolve gracefully over time, or in the techniques used to build it.
Wherever they find it, I am grateful to our contributors for taking time to give us a tour. I hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as Andy and I have enjoyed editing it, and that it inspires you to create something beautiful, too.
