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Another author and his books in the same category of excellence as Kernighan and his books, is Jon Bentley and his books Programming Pearls and More Programmin

Another author and his books in the same category of excellence as Kernighan and his books, is Jon Bentley and his books Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scient...

carterdmorgan 2y ago
Added to the backlog! As our audience grows, we've debated doing live backlog grooming on YouTube so that listeners have a chance to chime in and voice their opinions on what we should read.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  I think that's a good idea.
rramadass 2y ago
Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. What this teaches you is how to think about efficiency from the top down with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language and hence useful to all programmers. Pair it with modern books on efficiency which deal mainly with compiler-level/OS-level/Processor-level performance techniques by Agner Fog, Fedor Pikus etc. and you get a complete picture.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  the war stories briefly mentioned in the footnotes of the book, are very interesting too. for example, one of them is about a team that speeded up the run time of a quicksort implementation on a supercomputer by a factor of a thousand times (yes, times, IIRC, not percent), by doing successive optimisations at many layers of the stack, from high level algorithms and data structures, down to the hardware.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language did you mean algorithms and data structures?
  - rramadass 2y ago
    No. Algorithms and Data Structures always go together (like Yin/Yang) and hence i did not spell that out. At the time the book was written Structured Programming techniques and control structures were somewhat new and people wondered whether it was possible to really write efficient programs using these in a high-level language. In the preface/introduction itself Bentley points this out and says he is looking at efficiency at the "Design Level"(various) and thus you have chapters like "Modifying Data Structures" (Time vs. Space) and "Modifying Code" (mainly Loop rules) which show one how to transform code in the same language to a better form (we know this today as helping the compiler generate better object code). As he points out in the book; people forget the constant factors in big-oh and much efficiency can be had by tweaking this. This is particularly true nowadays since there are so many interpreted/vm-based/jit-compiled/scripting languages where with some "under the hood" knowledge you can get good performance just by source level transformations.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. Yes, that's a really good one. I own a copy of it, bought years ago, and have read it pretty much cover to cover. Have also applied the guidelines in it, some.

carterdmorgan 2y ago

Added to the backlog! As our audience grows, we've debated doing live backlog grooming on YouTube so that listeners have a chance to chime in and voice their opinions on what we should read.

fuzztester 2y ago
I think that's a good idea.

rramadass 2y ago

Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. What this teaches you is how to think about efficiency from the top down with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language and hence useful to all programmers. Pair it with modern books on efficiency which deal mainly with compiler-level/OS-level/Processor-level performance techniques by Agner Fog, Fedor Pikus etc. and you get a complete picture.

fuzztester 2y ago
the war stories briefly mentioned in the footnotes of the book, are very interesting too. for example, one of them is about a team that speeded up the run time of a quicksort implementation on a supercomputer by a factor of a thousand times (yes, times, IIRC, not percent), by doing successive optimisations at many layers of the stack, from high level algorithms and data structures, down to the hardware.
fuzztester 2y ago
>with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language did you mean algorithms and data structures?
- rramadass 2y ago
  No. Algorithms and Data Structures always go together (like Yin/Yang) and hence i did not spell that out. At the time the book was written Structured Programming techniques and control structures were somewhat new and people wondered whether it was possible to really write efficient programs using these in a high-level language. In the preface/introduction itself Bentley points this out and says he is looking at efficiency at the "Design Level"(various) and thus you have chapters like "Modifying Data Structures" (Time vs. Space) and "Modifying Code" (mainly Loop rules) which show one how to transform code in the same language to a better form (we know this today as helping the compiler generate better object code). As he points out in the book; people forget the constant factors in big-oh and much efficiency can be had by tweaking this. This is particularly true nowadays since there are so many interpreted/vm-based/jit-compiled/scripting languages where with some "under the hood" knowledge you can get good performance just by source level transformations.
fuzztester 2y ago
>Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. Yes, that's a really good one. I own a copy of it, bought years ago, and have read it pretty much cover to cover. Have also applied the guidelines in it, some.