I lately completed studying A Philosophy of Software program Design by John Ousterhout and I assumed that it will be helpful to share my opinion about it with the group.
My motivation for choosing up this ebook was that I noticed that it is likely one of the finest sellers in Amazon and it had loads of good evaluations.
Concerning the creator #
The creator of the ebook is John Ousterhout. He’s a professor of laptop science at Stanford College. He was a professor of laptop science on the College of California, Berkeley the place he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit and proposed the concept of co-scheduling. John Ousterhout has accomplished some important contributions to the sector of laptop science and has been awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award and an ACM Software program System Award.
Concerning the contents #
This ebook was written by John Ousterhout for use as the principle studying materials of one of many topics within the laptop science program at Stanford College. Regardless of the highly-academic background of the creator and being a part of the content material of the pc science program at Stanford College, the ebook is written in a really colloquial fashion that may be adopted with simple by non-academics and newbie laptop science college students.
I’m an skilled developer and I’ve heard about most of the concepts within the ebook earlier than. Nonetheless, I nonetheless loved this ebook as a result of I feel the creator has accomplished an excellent job extracting the essence of some ideas and placing it down in phrases. I notably loved the sections about complexity, interfaces, and abstractions.
I additionally loved that the creator dares to problem some widespread finest practices equivalent to “capabilities needs to be small” or “courses ought to solely do one factor” as a result of it encourages experimentation and being open-minded.
The ebook is split into the next 21 chapters:
- Introduction
- The character of complexity
- Working code isn’t sufficient
- Modules needs to be deep
- Info hiding (and Leakage)
- Basic-purpose modules are deeper
- Completely different layers, completely different abstractions
- Pull complexity downwards
- Higher collectively or higher aside?
10 Outline errors out of existence - Design it twice
- Why write feedback? The 4 excuses
- Feedback ought to describe issues that aren’t apparent from the code
- Selecting names
- Write feedback first
- Modifying present code
- Consistency
- Code needs to be apparent
- Software program tendencies
- Designing for efficiency
- Conclusion
I actually loved the primary half of the ebook. The primary chapters talk about the character and the principle causes of complexity in software program. The next chapters discover some widespread design issues in modules, interfaces, abstractions, coupling, and error dealing with. The ebook highlights the principle issues as a listing of crimson flags that we should always keep away from. I disliked that among the concepts felt one way or the other opinionated and not likely goal. Nonetheless, I didn’t have an enormous downside with it as a result of I really agree with a lot of the factors of view of the creator. Additionally, he wouldn’t be capable of problem some widespread finest practices with out being opinionated.
After chapter 11 the content material was much less interesting to me as a result of I felt that I wasn’t studying as a lot as I used to be studying throughout the first half of the ebook. Nonetheless, that is in all probability my case as a result of I’ve learn different books (e.g. Clear Code) on related matters.
I’d advocate the ebook for each senior and junior builders as a result of I actually loved the primary half of the ebook and I assume that some much less skilled builders will discover the second half of the ebook extra fascinating than I did.
I’d additionally like to say that this ebook in all fairness low cost. Many tech books have a value mark of 40 to 60 USD and this books out there for 17.27 USD in its paperback version. Sadly, the ebook will not be out there in digital codecs.
When you assume that you’d get pleasure from this ebook, it is possible for you to to buy it on-line at Amazon UK or Amazon US.
I hope you will have discovered this evaluate helpful. I’ve plans to attempt to evaluate all of the tech books that I learn from now personal. So please observe me if you wish to learn extra ebook evaluations sooner or later.
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