Jon Louis BentleyBesprekingen

This was a useful place to pick and choose my own pearls, back when I was programming.

A lot of good articles on the intricacies of computer programming. A bit outdated, but then again, what isn't?

Indeholder "Preface", "Contents", "Part I: Programming Techniques", "Column 1: Profilers", " Computing Primes. Using Profilers. A Specialized Profiler. Building Profilers. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Column 2: Associative Arrays", " Associative Arrays in Awk. A Finite State Machine Simulator. Topological Sorting. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Column 3: Confessions of a Coder", " Binary Search. Selection. A Subroutine Library. Principles. Problems.", "Column 4: Self-Describing Data", " Name-Value Pairs. Provenances in Programming. A Sorting Lab. Principles. Problems.", "Part II: Tricks of the Trade", "Column 5: Cutting the Gordian Knot", " A Quiz. Some Solutions. Hints. Principles. Problems. Further Reading. Debugging. ", "Column 6: Bumper-Sticker Computer Science", " Coding. User Interfaces. Debugging. Performance. Documentation. Managing Software. Miscellaneous Rules. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Column 7: The Envelope is Back", " A Warm-Up for Cool Brains. Performance Rules of Thumb. Little's Law. Principles. Problems. Further Reading. Quick Calculations in Everyday Life.", "Column 8: The Furbelow Memorandum", " The Memo. Principles. Further Reading.", "Part III: I/O Fit for Humans", "Column 9: Little Languages", " The Pic Language. Perspective. Pic Preprocessors. Little Languages for Implementing Pic. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Column 10: Document Design", " Tables. Three Design Principles. Figures. Text. The Right Medium. Principles. Problems. Further Reading. A Catalog of Pet Peeves.", "Column 11: Graphic Output", " A Case Study. A Sampler of Displays. Principles. Problems. Further Reading. Napoleon's March to Moscow.", "Column 12: A Survey of Surveys", " The Problem of Polling. The Languages. The Pictures. Principles. Problems.", "Part IV: Algorithms", "Column 13: A Sample of Brilliance", " A Sampling of Sampling Algorithms. Floyd's Algorithm. Random Permutations. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Column 14: Birth of a Cruncher", " The Problem. Newton Iteration. A Great Place to Start. The Code. Principles. Problems. Further Reading. A Big Success Story.", "Column 15: Selection", " The Problem. The Program. Analysis of Run Time. Principles. Problems. Further Reading.", "Appendix 1: The C and Awk Languages", "Appendix 2: A Subroutine Library", "Solutions to Selected Problems", "Index".

Vældig inspirerende bog, som bør genlæses med regelmæssige mellemrum.

Indeholder "Part I: Preliminaries", "Part II: Performance", "Part III: The Product". "Epilog", "Appendix: Catalog of Algorithms", "Hints for Selected Problems", "Solutions to Selected Problems", "Index".
"Part I: Preliminaries" indeholder "Column 1: Cracking the Oyster", "Column 2: Aha! Algorithms", "Column 3: Data Structures Programs", "Column 4: Writing Correct Programs"
"Part II: Performance" indeholder "Column 5: Perspective on Performance", "Column 6: The Back of the Envelope", "Column 7: Algorithm Design Techniques", "Column 8: Code Tuning", "Column 9: Squeezing Space"
"Part III: The Product" indeholder "Column 10: Sorting", "Column 11: Searching", "Column 12: Heaps", "Column 13: A Spelling Checker".
Stadig ganske aktuel selv om nogle af eksemplerne er overhalede af hardwaren, dvs man skal bare gange problemstørrelsen med fx 100 og så er de stadig aktuelle.
Jons bøger bør genlæses mindst hvert andet år, hvis man skriver programmer til daglig

If you want to learn about the latest web programming frameworks, design patterns, J2EE, .NET, CSS, RoR, etc. then please stay away from this book. Once you think you mastered it all, became a professional programmer with also a nice CS degree under your belt come back and start to read this book for pure pleasure and wisdom. It is with high probability that you'll have both and more than you could have imagined.

Bentley's classic work is still relevant but not in ways most programmers will imagine at the beginning. You'll probably never go and write your own search routines and re-implement classical data structures (you'll use the one that comes with the standard libraries of your language of choice) but you'll always meet some problems which will puzzle you with interesting constraints. This is what Programming Pearls is all about. Study the examples for fun and maybe laugh at them for their simplicity but then remember to applied the strong principles in that book to your daily technical problems (programming related or not).

Lively but dated intro to data structures.

I originally saw this book as a pre-print for a class taught by Jon on software engineering. I was deeply influenced by the four fundamentals rules: code simplification, problem simplification, relentless suspicion, and early binding which first appeared Elements Programming Style (which I have never read... much to my shame). I can see the influence of this book on every major piece of code I have written as well as how I approach systems which need to be sped up. My single biggest take away was to focus my attention on what will make the biggest difference. For example, if a program is spending all it's time in IO, don't improve the sorting algorithm, go after the IO subsystem.