Product Description

With the same insight and authority that made their book The Unix Programming Environment a classic, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike have written The Practice of Programming to help make individual programmers more effective and productive. This book is full of practical advice and real-world examples in C, C++, Java, and a variety of special-purpose languages. Kernighan and Pike have distilled years of experience writing programs, teaching, and working with other programmers to create this book. Anyone who writes software will profit from its principles and guidance.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115280 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Co-authored by Brian Kernighan, one of the pioneers of the C programming language, The Practice of Programming is a manual of good programming style that will help any C/C++ or Java developer create faster, more maintainable code.

Early sections look at some of the pitfalls of C/C++, with numerous real-world excerpts of confusing or incorrect code. The authors offer many tips and solutions, including a guide for variable names and commenting styles. Next, they cover algorithms, such as binary and quick sorting. Here, the authors show how to take advantage of the built-in functions in standard C/C++. When it comes to data structures, such as arrays, linked lists,and trees, the authors compare the options available to C, C++, Java and even Perl developers with a random-text-generation program (using a sophisticated Markov chain algorithm) written for each language.

Subsequent sections cover debugging tips (including how to isolate errors with debugging statements) and testing strategies (both white-box and black-box testing) for verifying the correctness of code. Final sections offer tips on creating more portable C/C++ code, with the last chapter suggesting that programmers can take advantage of interpreters (and regular expressions) to gain better control over their code. A handy appendix summarises the dozens of tips offered throughout the book.

With its common-sense expertise and range of examples drawn from C, C++ and Java, The Practice of Programming is an excellent resource for improving the style and performance of your code base. --Richard Dragan,amazon.com

From the Back Cover

With the same insight and authority that made their book The Unix Programming Environment a classic, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike have written The Practice of Programming to help make individual programmers more effective and productive.

The practice of programming is more than just writing code. Programmers must also assess tradeoffs, choose among design alternatives, debug and test, improve performance, and maintain software written by themselves and others. At the same time, they must be concerned with issues like compatibility, robustness, and reliability, while meeting specifications.

The Practice of Programming covers all these topics, and more. This book is full of practical advice and real-world examples in C, C++, Java, and a variety of special-purpose languages. It includes chapters on:

• debugging: finding bugs quickly and methodically
• testing: guaranteeing that software works correctly and reliably
• performance: making programs faster and more compact
• portability: ensuring that programs run everywhere without change
• design: balancing goals and constraints to decide which algorithms and data structures are best
• interfaces: using abstraction and information hiding to control the interactions between components
• style: writing code that works well and is a pleasure to read
• notation: choosing languages and tools that let the machine do more of the work

Kernighan and Pike have distilled years of experience writing programs, teaching, and working with other programmers to create this book. Anyone who writes software will profit from the principles and guidance in The Practice of Programming.

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About the Author

Brian W. Kernighan works in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is Consulting Editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series and the author, with Dennis Ritchie, of The C Programming Language.

Rob Pike works in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He was a lead architect and implementer of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. His research focuses on software that makes it easier for people to write software.

020161586XAB04062001

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Customer Reviews

I didn't know how little I knew
Once you get past the first chapter, which states a lot of what anyone would consider to be obvious, it gets into an area which will make you reassess your practices.

It made me appreciate how much time saving later a little investment in practicing good programming style can make.

Although the book works through examples in C, C++ and Java, with a little perl, awk and Tcl for good measure, it is relevant to any language.

Ada programmers especially should read it instead of believing that the language does it all for them.

the best programming style guide around
This is a guide to how to program with style of the masters.

Every style point Brian makes is argued for convincingly and then backed up by his empirical experiences.

For an experienced programmer much of this will be common sense. Through codifying and naming these principles it may help quality coding become more common.

This book is not specific to any language. The example snippets are mainly C & Unix, but are universally applicable. They can be followed by any experienced coder.

This is both a great tutorial and reference. It is solid stuff but easy reading.

Should be mandatory reading for any newcomer to programming
A must in these dark times of complex bloated programming with braindead operating systems and horrible APIs, disguised as "software engineering". A masterwork written by people who work in one of the few places where actual innovation is taking place, who have done substantial contributions to systems software research, and still doing them (Plan 9, for example). A sort of manifest against the current trends in software development, written by people who have worked (and presumably work) on critical systems such as phone switches. Read this book, then read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred P. Brooks and start to wonder why software quality is decreasing and the same errors in the past are repeated again and again. I repeat: This is a true masterwork.