Name: Beautiful Code
ISBN: 9780596510046

Beautiful Code

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.

What Hacker News says

vogelkeAug 2025

I'd recommend the book "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think". Published by O'Reilly, ISBN-10 ‏ : 0596510047

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vishnuguptaFeb 2025

While on this topic, one book I really enjoyed is "Beautiful Code"[1]. It is not preachy or prescriptive but a diverse set of programmers showing the code they enjoyed writing.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/405790.Beautiful_Code

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azemetreMay 2024

I mean IME with Pluralsight, I fully meant what I said. Most videos barely go beyond the documentation.

I've paid for Lynda (now LinkedIn learning), Frontend Masters, Egghead, educative.io, Udacity, Laracasts, UI.dev, Safari, Ardan Labs, etc.

If you want to interview for a FAANG job, educative.io has the best content. Everything else on the site is extremely poor but hey if you need to refresh on system design or leetcode patterns no other content is as good.

I use to like Frontend Masters, but the decay rate of their courses is too high. You can take a workshop from 2 months ago but the instructor will never mention the version of the language they use and often the project files will fail to install. I absolutely do not think this is a good thing and should absolutely not be tolerated. You can blame NodeJS but it's a terrible indictment when 90% of your catalog is worthless. I've also disliked the new generation of instructors they have where it's mostly the same 3-4 people every year that always talk about the same topics. It's disappointing because this would be a service I use to recommend every frontend dev 3 years ago.

The only thing I continued to subscribe to is Safari/O'Reilly. Here you get books from all the major publishers and some decent courses as well (like Ultimate Go by Bill Kennedy); but I won't be renewing this. Books on extremely advance topics aren't released in massive amounts annually. There's like maybe one or two software books truly worth buying every year. Here's what I've bought the last 5 years (Beautiful Code, The Cathedral & the Bazaar, The Soul of a New Machine, Writing An Interpreter In Go, Game Engine Black Book, Refactoring UI).

Maybe I've progressed enough in my career that I see the best way to learn is to just read the docs ASAP then just build as many things as possible after. I truly mean build too, you can't watch someone make a project for you and copy them. You have to struggle when learning, because that's how you confirm your priors and what you actually know. There's also the benefit of just getting better at delivering software the more you make.

They've done studies about pottery classes where two groups of students were graded differently, one would be graded on the amount of pottery they make and the other would be graded on a single piece at the end of the system. The students that were graded on the amount of pottery tended to do better and make more advance things. This mimics my experience as a dev too.

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sargstuffJan 2024

* A Brief History | Babbage Engine : https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/history/

* https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...

* First OOP programming language was Simula (~1961). : ( https://history-computer.com/simula-guide/ / https://twobithistory.org/2019/01/31/simula.html )

* simula : https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/a-detailed-1978-history-of...

* Simula & smalltalk : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~charlie/courses/15-214/2014-fall/sli...

* Coding From 1849 to 2022: a Guide to The Timeline of Programming Languages by Severine Hierso https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...

* "Hello, World!": The History of Programming Paperback by Prof James Steinberg (Author)

* Software: A Technical History (ACM Books) by Kim W Tracy (Author)

* The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra by Edgar G. Daylight (Author), Niklaus Wirth (Author), et. al

* History of Programming Languages (Acm Monograph Series) by Richard L. Wexelblat (Editor)

* Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) by Federico Biancuzzi (Author), Chromatic (Author)

Related with narrower, non-OOP focus:

* Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)

* Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks Jr. (Author)

* 6 programming languages invented by women : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/6-programming-languages-that-a...

* Just what is TeX? : https://www.tug.org/whatis.html

* MUMPS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

* CAche Objectscript : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cach%C3%A9_ObjectScript

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ocharlesAug 2023

The book "Beautiful Code", maybe?

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fhd2Aug 2023

Nice example! I also did some reading in the mean time, and I guess for a 17th century definition of "art", a well-written algorithm that does the job efficiently and is easy to reason about would even classify as art. I quite enjoyed the book "Beautiful Code" for this kind of stuff.

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