Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think

Editors: Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 618
ISBN: 978-0596510046

This is an old book, but that doesn't matter. It's a collection of 30 essays each about a piece of code that its invited author regards as the most beautiful they know. It’s a simple idea but one that allows a group of programmers to write about aspects of programming that we very rarely talk about.

Not all the essays are winners, but there are enough gems from authors that have a track record in expressing programming ideas – Brian Kernighan, Jon Bently, Charles Petzold, Brian Hayes and so on.  Worth exploring.

Pearls of Algorithm Engineering

Author: Paolo Ferragina
Publisher: ‎Cambridge University Press
Pages: 326
ISBN: ‎978-1009123280

This book looks at the way algorithms behave as the task gets bigger, a topic Mike James described as fascinating and worth a look.

Awarding the title five stars, Mike said this is a second-level book that examines algorithms in terms of both time and I/O operations. This means that we not only examine the time-complexity of algorithms, but the I/O -complexity, something that is more practically relevant, but mostly ignored.

Mike's conclusion is that this is a good book but you have to be the right reader to appreciate it. If you like, even a little bit, anything by Donald Knuth, then this is a book you will enjoy and learn a lot from. It isn't an easy read and there is a lot of math notation if not deep mathematics. Its real value is that, if you think that the analysis of algorithms stops at time-complexity this will open your eyes to a bigger world.

The Programmer’s Guide To Theory

Author: Dr Mike James
Publisher: I/O Press
Pages: 214
ISBN: 978-1871962437

As its subtitle "Great ideas explained" suggests, this book sets out to present the fundamental ideas of computer science in an informal and yet informative way. I Programmer's own Mike James explores the concepts that underpin modern computer use, and shows how they provide ways to reason about information and randomness that are understandable without the need to resort to abstract math.

Topics covered in the book range from Turing Machines, the Halting Problem and Finite State machines, through lower-level concerns such as Boolean logic, information theory and error correction, to deeper dives into computational complexity. All are covered in a very approachable, and even entertaining way.

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