The Practice of Programming

Yep. I'm far from done with SICP, but the other books I feel compelled to order are also very interesting.

Recently I read a quote somewhere about programming style that was taken out of Kernighan and Pike's "The Practice of Programming". It was neat enough that I went to check it out on Amazon, and as one would, ended up buying it.

Having read through the first few chapters so far it's been a good refreshed on some basic algorithms, and some well thought out strategies. The CVS formatting example in chapter 4 is far from amazing, but it takes a good measured approach to a common problem that has far too many annoying little edge cases. More than that however, the Markov Chain work in chapter 3 was great. It was interesting to see the 150 line C program taken down to 20 lines in awk. Maybe one of these days I'll take a look at that(after haskell, clojure, ada and all the other languages with nifty features I've been wanting to look at). What was surprising though was how poor some of the STL implementations appeared to be.

A very compact book well worth the read for anyone serious about programming. If I have any criticism of it, it would likely lie in some of the rather cryptic examples that could've been a lot more clear with proper variable naming. They are always explained afterwards, and very clever, but many of them don't feel entirely necessary. Despite that minor niggle, definitely recommended and I look forward to the other half.