Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (Effective Software Development Series) - Softcover

Ross Venables; Spinellis, Diomidis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201799405 ISBN 13: 9780201799408

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003

Synopsis

This book is a unique and essential reference that focuses upon the reading and comprehension of existing software code. While code reading is an important task faced by the vast majority of students, it has been virtually ignored as a discipline by existing references. The book fills this need with a practical presentation of all important code concepts, form, structure, and syntax that a student is likely to encounter. The concepts are supported by examples taken from real-world open source software projects. The focus upon reading code (rather than developing and implementing programs from scratch) provides for a vastly increased breadth of coverage.

About this title

About the Author

Diomidis Spinellis has been developing the concepts presented in this book since 1985, while also writing groundbreaking software applications and working on multimillion-line code bases. Spinellis holds an M.Eng. degree in software engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from Imperial College London. Currently he is an associate professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business.

From the Back Cover

If you are a programmer, you need this book.

• You've got a day to add a new feature in a 34,000-line program: Where do you start? Page 333
• How can you understand and simplify an inscrutable piece of code? Page 39
• Where do you start when disentangling a complicated build process? Page 167
• How do you comprehend code that appears to be doing five things in parallel? Page 132

You may read code because you have to--to fix it, inspect it, or improve it. You may read code the way an engineer examines a machine--to discover what makes it tick. Or you may read code because you are scavenging--looking for material to reuse.

Code-reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique you use when is crucial. In this indispensable book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.

Fact: If you make a habit of reading good code, you will write better code yourself.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201799405
• ISBN 13: 9780201799408
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528