Posts tagged "books":
On programming style
I am pretty excited to learn that Strange Loop is happening this year! It is one of the few technical conference that I always recommend to my fellow teammates. What is more exciting are the sessions including few keynotes. What this has to do with the topic of the blog post, which is on programming style, you say? If you squint at the sessions, the author of Exercises in Programming Style is the first keynote speaker. It is one of the best book on programming I have ever read in recent years. I am not going to spoil it here with summary or gist but I'd like share few take home points I really liked about the book.
- Having a clear, well understood programming problem throughout the book: given a text file, we want to display the N (e.g. 25) most frequent words and corresponding frequencies ordered by decreasing value of frequency. Once the understanding what problem we are dealing with out of the way, the remaining is just choosing a style to solve it, which the book does fantastic job to explain. It even has full source code in the book.
- Concise and clear way of making the reader understand many programming techniques that one might otherwise gets really confused. For example, Monads, CPS (continuation passing style), FRP and many others.
- Have you ever wondered how neural networks (NN) works? Second edition have you covered with clear explanation and code as she has done with many concepts from the first edition.
I strongly recommend the book to both novice or pros alike. It is a book that you rarely see in terms of style and clarity with full working code. We really need this kind of books more to have programming accessible and understood by more people. I do believe it is a classic. If you are planning to attend Strange Loop, remember to say hello and thank her for it.