Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 18 Feb 2005

Price when reviewed:

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

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Specs

ISBN 1593270038

PAGES 260

If you missed out on the kind of programming basics covered by a computer science course, this is the book for you.

Randall Hyde doesn't really teach you anything much about modern programming and he doesn't mention object-oriented languages or anything similar. What he does tell you about are the low-level workings that are essential to making programs run. He deals with floating-point arithmetic, Boolean logic and bit manipulation, among other things. In this sense the title of the book is misleading in that it isn't about 'great code', but it is about 'understanding the machine'.

As programming languages have developed they have moved away from the underlying hardware. So, for example, you don't need to know anything about floating-point arithmetic to add two numbers together, and the hardware has little to do with the ideas of objects, classes, properties and inheritance.

The book explains in detail what most programmers take for granted. If you have any curiosity about how things work then there is no harm in finding out about the low-level workings. It can suggest ways of improving the efficiency of your programs and it's essential if you want to deal with low-level things that need assembler. If this interests you then Hyde's book is a decent and worthwhile read, but it's not essential to writing great code.

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