I reviewed the book on my website last year. I think I would recommend the book given the caveats in my review.
I did (and still do) think this book is more useful for more senior programmers. I found the book to be most useful when recognizing that the beauty of the code was often a function of the context in which it was used. A more junior programmer might not recognize the context and therefore get the wrong impression.
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This can be classified as an "advanced book" in the sense that to really evaluate/appreciate the design choices made by the 30+ different authors (and projects), you should have some experience developping software, where you have wrestled with the same general kind of design issues.
You should also have a reading familiarity with language grammars (BNF) and parsing, algorithms, complexity (O) and testing, programming languages (C, C++, Java, Haskell, Scheme/Lisp, Perl), frameworks (OO) and architectures (layering, services).
For a novice (actually for any...) programmer, I'd rather as a first read recommend a book like "Perl Best Practices" by Damian Conway or Bjarne Stroustrups new book on Programming, Principles and Practice(see ref). But with the above prerequisites, I find the "Beautiful Code" book thought provoking and inspiring (each author has his own preferences viz. design and coding - sometimes contradicting - , but they describe the alternatives, explain their mistakes and argue for their final choices.
Best regards,
Allan Dystrup
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