The Practice of Programming

Brian W. Kernighanworks in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is Consulting Editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series and the author, with Dennis Ritchie, ofThe C Programming Language.

Rob Pikeworks in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He was a lead architect and implementer of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. His research focuses on software that more >>

Brian W. Kernighanworks in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is Consulting Editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series and the author, with Dennis Ritchie, ofThe C Programming Language.

Rob Pikeworks in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He was a lead architect and implementer of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. His research focuses on software that makes it easier for people to write software.

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With the same insight and authority that made their bookThe Unix Programming Environmenta classic,Brian KernighanandRob Pikehave writtenThe Practice of Programmingto help make individual programmers more effective and productive.

The practice of programming is more than just writing code. Programmers must also assess tradeoffs, choose among design alternatives, debug and test, improve performance, and maintain software written by themselves and others. At the same time, they must be concerned with issues like compatibility, robustness, and reliability, while meeting specifications.

The Practice of Programmingcovers all these topics, and more. This book is full of practical advice and real-world examples in C, C++, Java, and a variety of special-purpose languages. It includes chapters on:

• debugging: finding bugs quickly and methodically
• testing: guaranteeing that software works correctly and reliably
• performance: making programs faster and more compact
• portability: ensuring that programs run everywhere without change
• design: balancing goals and constraints to decide which algorithms and data structures are best
• interfaces: using abstraction and information hiding to control the interactions between components
• style: writing code that works well and is a pleasure to read
• notation: choosing languages and tools that let the machine do more of the work

Kernighan and Pike have distilled years of experience writing programs, teaching, and working with other programmers to create this book. Anyone who writes software will profit from the principles and guidance inThe Practice of Programming.

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Have you ever...

• wasted a lot of time coding the wrong algorithm?
• used a data structure that was much too complicated?
• tested a program but missed an obvious problem?
• spent a day looking for a bug you should have found in five minutes?
• needed to make a program run three times faster and use less memory?
• struggled to move a program from a workstation to a PC or vice versa?
• tried to make a modest change in someone else's program?
• rewritten a program because you couldn't understand it?

Was it fun?

These things happen to programmers all the time. But dealing with such problems is often harder than it should be because topics like testing, debugging, portability, performance, design alternatives, and style -- thepracticeof programming -- are not usually the focus of computer science or programming courses. Most programmers learn them haphazardly as their experience grows, and a few never learn them at all.

In a world of enormous and intricate interfaces, constantly changing tools and languages and systems, and relentless pressure for more of everything, one can lose sight of the basic principles -- simplicity, clarity, generality -- that form the bedrock of good software. One can also overlook the value of tools and notations that mechanize some of software creation and thus enlist the computer in its own programming.

Our approach in this book is based on these underlying, interrelated principles, which apply at all levels of computing. These includesimplicity, which keeps programs short and manageable;clarity, which makes sure they are e << less