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The Practice of Programming

Classic book that i should have finished reading far far earlier.

This book was baught quite long ago. But i didnt have enough time/chance/whatever to read it all [for a reason or two]. Just finished reading the whole book today. All i can say is.. a must-buy and a must-read.

Brian W. Kernighan always writes great books. The K&R C, The UNX Programming Environment, etc. The Practice of Programming is no exception. The authors (Brain & Rob) lead you thourgh every areas of programming: ie. style, design, coding, interface, debugging, test, performance, portability. The famous UNX guys give you very kool tips & tricks from their own (wonderful) experiences.

I recommend you read every word of this book, which would eases your daily coding life pretty pretty much. You will become more productive and you'll definitely avoid otherwise stupid and/or obscure mistakes.

Beside the their insightful words, the code snippet provided is awesome. You will see how gurus write clean & elegant code in a clear and reasonable way. Here are three programs adopted from the book:

1) A Markov-chain that makes you produce beautiful but nonsense text. 2) A csv (comma-seperated values) parser. 3). A simple grep that supports '', '$', '.', '*'.

18 Jul 2005

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