Beautiful Code, Beautiful Project

Even the title has a special lilt to it -- "Beautiful Code". So what is beautiful code? It is code that is carefully designed and often unusal, but which solves a problem in an elegant way. It is code that acknowledges that trade-offs are made, and rules broken. It is code that gets the job done.

I'm not inclined to recommend books -- especially books that I haven't even read, let alone books that haven't even been published yet. But, for a number of reasons, I'm going to make an exception in this case. I'm going to break one of those rules, in other words.

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, edited by Andy Oram and DDJ contributing editor Greg Wilson(and soon to be published by O'Reilly & Associates), is a book you'll want to have. I'm going to buy a copy.

So what's the book about? It is a series of chapters written by well-known (and some not so well-known) programmers who share projects they consider "beautiful code." Many of the contributors have written articles for Dr. Dobb's over the years. Those authors and their Beautiful Code contributions include:

• Jon Bentley on "The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote".
• Alberto Savoia on "Beautiful Tests" (okay, Alberto hasn't written for DDJ before, but he has an article in an upcoming issue).
• Charles Petzold on "On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing".
• Lincoln Stein on "Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl".
• Jim Kent on "The Design of the Gene Sorter".
• Diomidis Spinellis on "Another Level of Indirection".
• Adam Kolawa on "Beautiful Numerics"
• Christopher Seiwald and Laura Wingerd on "Code in Motion".
• TV Raman on "Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop".
• Andreas Zeller on "Beautiful Debugging"

And these are just the programmers who have appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal. Other contributions include:

• "Beautiful Brevity: Rob Pike's Regular Expression Matcher" by Brian Kernighan.
• "Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology" by Karl Fogel.
• "Finding Things" by Tim Bray.
• "Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order)" by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
• "Accelerating Population Count" by Henry Warren.

To mention a few...

Beautiful Code is a wrap, at least according to Greg Wilson, which I take it to mean that all the chapters have been submitted to the publisher and that the authors can kick back and relax until the proofing cycle starts.

Here's the publisher's description of the book:

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.

And there's another reason to buy the book: All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. Beautiful indeed.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:53 AM  Permalink