Linked by Owen Anderson on Thu 27th Nov 2003 05:25 UTC
"Code Reading: An Open Source Perspective", by Diomidis Spinellis, is a new kind of book. It's a foray into a domain normally left untouched by Computer Science texts and exemplifies yet another positive contribution from the Open Source movement. Simply put, Code Reading is a detailed discussion of the techniques required to read and maintain both good and bad code. As an interesting twist, the author draws on projects from the Open Source world to provide examples, both good and bad.
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Thanks for the review, and for simply bringing this book to my attention. I am trying to become a programmer, and I'm finding that reading code is the most difficult thing to pick up -- much harder and slower than writing it. I find that once I've thought a problem through, implementing a solution is fairly quick; but understanding what someone else's program is doing takes much more time. And reading code is not covered in the classroom at all(not yet for me, at any rate). I may have to pick up a copy of this book.
My questions to the reviewer are: 1) How much did the book do for you from a practical standpoint? Do you find it easier/faster reading code now that you've read it? 2) What level of experience do you think the book requires to be useful?