Writing efficient programs

What Hacker News says

1. rramadassJul 2024
   Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. What this teaches you is how to think about efficiency from the top down with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language and hence useful to all programmers. Pair it with modern books on efficiency which deal mainly with compiler-level/OS-level/Processor-level performance techniques by Agner Fog, Fedor Pikus etc. and you get a complete picture.
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2. fuzztesterJul 2024
   >Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book.

   Yes, that's a really good one. I own a copy of it, bought years ago, and have read it pretty much cover to cover. Have also applied the guidelines in it, some.

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3. vram22Mar 2024
   The book "Writing Efficient Programs", by Jon Bentley, is still a valuable resource. See the short subthread starting with a comment I posted here some years ago:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407192

   A few people had replied, agreeing with my opinion, and giving some more details. One of them called the book "gold".

   I have also posted about the book a few other times on HN, over the years.

   Those comments can be found by searching hn.algia.com for comments (not stories) matching the pattern "writing efficient programs vram22".

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4. rramadassDec 2023
   Also checkout the old (and slim) classic Writing Efficient Programs by Jon Bentley (of Programming Pearls fame).
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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. drallisonDec 2021
   Understanding Software Dynamics (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) 1st Edition by Richard L. Sites (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Software-Addison-Wesley...)

   This is a recent book and I have not completed reading it but I know already is it destined to become a classic. If you are serious about learning how to understand and improve code, this is the book for you. (Full disclosure: Dick is a long-standing friend and one of the brightest and insightful guys around.)

   Writing Efficient Programs (Prentice-Hall Software Series) 1st Edition by Jon Louis Bentley (https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Efficient-Programs-Prentice-H...)

   This book is out of print but I believe it's a better read that Jon's Programming Pearls books. C is a great (and permissive) programming language. Jon shows how the language can be exploited for gain performance. Evil but effective.

   Hacker's Delight 2nd Edition by Henry Warren (https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-2nd-Henry-Warren/dp/0...)

   The Hacker's Delight is exactly what Hank Warren intended--a collection of tricks and facts that programs can exploit. It's informative on many levels. It uses deep knowledge of how numbers (and other mathematical objects) work to compute useful information. And it shows how seemingly arcane information can be useful. For a programmer excited by the fabric of programs, it is a continual delight.

   The first edition has a clarity and compactness that I find appealing. The second edition has additional material. When you get through all of the Delights you can read Knuth Volume 4 which embeds more arcane and useful knowledge.

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