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from: O'Reilly Media, Inc.  List Price: $44.99 Amazon.com's Price: $38.88 You Save: $6.11 (14%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 005.1 EAN: 9780596510046 Format: Illustrated ISBN: 0596510047 Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 618 Publication Date: June 26, 2007 Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: 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. tion. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - It ain't all that beautiful...The editors of this uneven book give us 33 chapters from various, often well-known developers, in which these developers describe some code and explain why they think that it is beautiful. There are some gems, but it's not light reading and quite a bit of it is a real slog. If you are a professional programmer, it's probably worth the effort, but otherwise I'd steer clear. And, in fact, all too much of the code is downright ugly. This starts, sadly enough, with the first example, ... Read More Rating: - Disappointing.I guess that my main problem is that the 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. I returned the book after reading the first two chapters. So, I cannot claim to review the whole book, but the first to chapters were very far from what I can call 'beautiful code'. The first chapter in the book presents a recursive C implementation of a greatly simplified regular expression parser. I would agree that this parser implementation is 'clever', but I cannot see the beauty of recursive C with ... Read More Rating:  - Not for the faint heartedI like this book but it is a flawed thing. Worth the read but not convinced it is worth the cost. I started more than half the chapters and skipped on because either it was too obtuse or specific to a given language/problem or too general to be useful. However there are also some great chapters. If you are looking for a gift for the tech-head who has everything then this could be a good choice. If funds are tight and you are buying for yourself you ... Read More Rating: - A couple of great essays, a bunch of so so ones.I must say I was pretty disappointed with this book. I expected so much more. The lead off piece by Brian Kernighan is the best in the book. I hoped that the rest of the book would at least try to be as good, but other than Matz's essay and perhaps Bently's (I can't remember now) they were mostly drek. Several were agonizingly boring, long fluff pieces about something they worked on that read as histories of the work they did on a piece of software. Very little insight into the creative process ... Read More Rating:  - Uneven, UninterestingThere's a critical need for a book on code aesthetics, elegance and comprehensibility that goes beyond simple style guidelines -- this isn't that book. The contributions are uneven, a few border on the incomprehensible, and most are simply not worth the time. There are no revelations or insights to be had. 
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