Archive for Books

Book Recommendation: Beautiful Code

July 29, 2007 at 9:52 pm · Filed under Books, Programming

I’m not even halfway through yet, but O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code really is a great book on the arts of programming. It contains about 30 essays by top-notch programmers, including veterans like Brian Kernighan or Charles Petzold, on what they consider beautiful code or programming concepts. The chapters vary greatly in difficulty, including both (rather) easy-to-understand concepts like a regexp matcher in 20 lines that show why simplicity is often a win and very specialized contributions like an image filter in Microsoft’s Intermediate Language. I think this is a book best read not cover-to-cover, instead just pick the most interesting chapters for you and see how elegant code can be.

One thing that also comes to mind reading this book is how short-lived many of the contributions were. Once-glorious hacks like Windows’ bitblt() implementation do not have much relevance in today’s world, where Google’s Map-Reduce provides the foundation of an enormous technological success story.

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Nerdy Book In-Jokes

November 1, 2006 at 12:12 pm · Filed under Books, Humour, Java

Tal Cohen maintains a great list of book in-jokes found in maths and computer publications. My favourite one is this index entry of The Java Programming Language:

In the index, we find (p. 579):

IndexOutOfBoundsException: 30, 196, 210, 596

The book is only 595 pages long.

Found via reddit.

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Spaceland: A Great Novel of the Fourth Dimension

September 25, 2006 at 10:22 pm · Filed under Books

I just finished Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension and heartily recommend it. It’s a story about a guy who is augmented by a species from the fourth dimension. He is then able to see and move in the next dimension, and travels from “spaceland” (our three-dimensional world) to its four-dimensional neighbours, Klupdom and Dronia.

Storywise, it’s a rather ordinary sci-fi novel, what caught me was Rudy Rucker’s intuitive description of how the fourth dimension might be like. The hero travels through one- and twodimensional worlds, and in leaving them when he gains another degree of freedom illustrates how hard to grasp the idea of a higher dimension is. For example, the line segments of a one-dimensional world cannot understand that they could see someone else than their left and right neighbours – nor see a reason for it, since they communicate by sound anyway (which is also their way of reproduction). Illustrated by simple sketches, this book is a great read for anyone slightly interested in maths, physics or other dimensions in general.

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