More programming pearls

What Hacker News says

1. knlbNov 2025
   I used to be scared of Awk, and then I read through the appendix / chapters of "More Programming Pearls" (https://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-Pearls-Confessions-C...) and it became a much easier to reason about language.

   The structure can be a bit confusing if you've only seen one liners because it has a lot of defaults that kick in when not specified.

   The pleasant surprise from learning to use awk was that bpftrace suddenly became much more understandable and easier to write as well, because it's partially inspired by awk.

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2. fuzztesterJul 2024
   Another author and his books in the same category of excellence as Kernighan and his books, is Jon Bentley and his books Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls.

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scient...

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3. AstroJetsonJul 2024
   I loved his articles in the ACM. They are collected in a book called Programming Pearls (https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp...) I also liked his second book More:Programming Pearls (https://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-Pearls-Confessions-C...)

   Some of the same articles, but with updates and added reader comments.

   (I posted Amazon, but there is a ton on the used market)

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4. vram22Jul 2023
   There is also a sequel, More Programming Pearls.

   I have both, and they are good.

   In one of them, Bentley shows some advanced uses of awk, involving its associative arrays, in a short awk program to do some sort of processing, and says that an equivalent C program would be a few hundred lines, IIRC.

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5. vram22May 2023
   Not all of the ones below may be textbooks, sorry, but IMO they are all very good. I cut my programming teeth on some of them, and read others at different times later in my career.

   How to Solve It, by Georg Polya. A famous Hungarian mathematician. A text on general problem solving principles or techniques. A classic.

   How to Solve It by Computer, by Dromey, an AU CS professor. In the same spirit as the Polya book, but applied to iteratively working out algorithms and pseudocode for common important programming problems.

   The K&R C book. What to say.

   The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike. Ditto.

   Programming Pearls, and More Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley. Among many other things, some clever / advanced uses of awk.

   Writing Efficient Programs, also by Bentley. I had mentioned it on HN earlier, and someone replied saying they had used it in real life, and it was gold.

   SQL for Professionals, by authors whose names I forget.

   The Object Primer, by can't remember who, but good.

   A Unix book by Kochan, IIRC.

   Object-Oriented Software Construction, by Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel programming language.

   A book on object-oriented analysis / design, can't remember the name, by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (?) and others. Learned about CRC cards from it. Very cool concept and technique.

   A book on Object-Oriented Design, by Grady Booch, from a time before he co-invented UML. Forget the exact name.

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6. vram22Nov 2022
   Yes, those two books are Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. I have both, and they are good. In one of them there is a section or chapter with a few examples of advanced uses of awk, involving awk's associative arrays, to do some non-trivial work in very few lines of code[1]. He shows or says that the equivalent programs in C would be much longer and harder to write.

   [1] Even more so than in most other common examples where awk programs are shorter than those in other languages.

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