Gather together a bunch of master programmers, and ask each one of them to write a chapter about a bit of code that they are really fascinated about. Pack it all up, sell it, and donate the proceeds to a charity of choice – in short, this is the thought process that went into O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code. The tome is almost 600 pages thick – but can it stack up?
The book is subdivided into 33 parts which each were written by a different author. Thus, each chapter is (mostly) independent from all others, code samples are written in different languages,… . Topics covered range from “simple” things like sorting to Google’s Map-and-Reduce-approach for massively parallel computing – in short, you are treated to a “smorgasboard” of things that could be interesting to the one or the other.
Much of the book looks at Open Source code that is freely available on the net – for example, chapter 2 takes a detailed look at a part of the subversion version control system. Another highly interesting chapter by Charles Petzold looks at dynamically generating code for the .NET framework – as I also write PocketPC applications, I naturally considered it a very interesting read.
As usual for such collection tomes, project management and code style also got covered, and a few chapters on various web-service related things round the book off.
In the end, Beautiful Code definitely contains a load of nice, innovative code samples. However, like the No Fluff Just Stuff anthologies, the book does not present itself in a coherent fashion – the multitude of authors definitely demands its toll here. People who are used to rigidly structured books will not be too happy with it. People wanting a quick overview of the topics covered(look at the table of contents here), get ready to pay 40$ at Amazon’s.
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