Programming Pearls (ACM Press)

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Jon Bentley

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Pages: 256 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0201657880

Pub: Addison Wesley

Pub date: 1999-10-13

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 52308

Editorial Review:

This reviewer still has the original edition of Bentley's book, 14-years-old now. Bentley's influential and eponymous columns first appeared in Communications of the ACM. Programming Pearls contains 15 of these--now updated--columns.
In his book Bentley assumes little more than a working knowledge of C, but it's in no way a guide to C. Rather, it approaches programming in the same way William Morris approached design--as a creative act founded on knowledge of the craft. From the first essay, Bentley emphasises the importance of accurately defining the problem in arriving at a fast, robust and efficient solution. He gives a number of examples that show how real understanding can reduce programming time, increase accuracy and reduce bugs.

The essays are divided into three alliteratively named sections: Preliminaries, Performance and Product. The first section covers writing a program that's correct for the programmer and the client. The second addresses efficiency, code tuning and performance. The last is a little unfocussed, albeit still interesting: it covers sorts, searches and heaps among other subjects. Take note, though: the solutions in the appendices are, in true C fashion, pointers to solutions. Programming Pearls is such a delight, you're likely to find yourself reading it in the bath. --Steve Patient

Reader Reviews:

pearls take a long time to appear and are rare (0/0 people found this helpful)

And so is this book.

Instead of presenting solutions, the book proposes a problem in each chapter and then guides the reader thru the thought process that leads to better and better solutions. At the end there is a set of questions that invite the reader to explore related problems and devise his own solutions.

One of the most important things to take out of this book is the mindset that the first solution to a problem is usually orders of magnitude worse than what you can achieve by actively trying to improve it.

Excellent, full of good ideas (1/2 people found this helpful)

Thoroughly recommended, well deserves a place on any developers bookshelf. I found the 'time cost of functions' appendix particularly useful.

A C programmers workbook (12/30 people found this helpful)

I don't understand why this gets such consistently high ratings. I purchased this on the basis of the reviews and read the first few chapters, since then it has been gathering dust. I'm sure it was a highly influential book back in 1986 but it now seems dated.

This is really a programmers work book looking at a number of very specific C programming problems. The examples in the book are very low level, working with the small amounts of memory and disk space available to programmers nearly 20 years ago it seems to have limited relevance to today's environments. Without a knowledge of C the examples are difficult to follow.

For someone learning C, working through the problems in the book would no doubt be useful and informative.

For the rest of us the more general good practice points can be found in many better books, e.g. Code Complete.

A manual with hacker spirit! (7/9 people found this helpful)

This book goes into what is overlooked and should be taught in "computer science" classes. Instead of focusing on conspiracy-driven "good programming practices" with trite and bloated algorithms, this book focuses on efficient, simple, and creative solutions to problems. This emphasizes on creating solutions that work well on COMPUTERS (albeit dated computers) and not abstract turing machines with no disk or memory limitations! Programming Pearls is easy to read, with lots of little excersizes to get your brain thinking for FUN and PROFIT. This book truly has SLACK.

Jon Bentley's small book is itself a pearl... (9/10 people found this helpful)

This slender volume is one of the all-time classics for programmers. Each chapter is an essay from Bentley's wide-ranging programming column dealing with an algorithm, an engineering principle or some more general technique of reasoning. Beginners and experienced professionals alike will be delighted. This is one of the few books for serious programmers which can also be read with pleasure by the non-expert, even by the non-programmer. You'll find the techniques of thinking explained in this book popping up again and again whether you are coding or reading the newspaper. I have owned and loaned I don't know how many copies; nobody ever returns it.

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