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

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.