Book 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.
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.
