June 2007
Intermediate to advanced
618 pages
18h 15m
English
Content preview from Beautiful CodeBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 15. The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design
Adam Kolawa
Some algorithms for seemingly straightforward and simplemathematical equations are actually extremely difficult to implement. For instance, rounding problems can compromise accuracy, some mathematical equations can cause values to exceed the range of a floating-point value on the system, and some algorithms (notably the classic Fourier Transform) take much too long if done in a brute-force fashion. Furthermore, different sets of data work better with different algorithms. Consequently, beautiful code and beautiful mathematics are not necessarily one and the same.
The programmers who wrote the code for the CERN mathematical library recognized the difference between mathematical equations and computed solutions: the difference between theory and practice. In this chapter, I will explore the beauty in a few of the programming strategies that they used to bridge that gap.
My Idea of Beautiful Code
My idea of beautiful code stems from my belief that the ultimate purpose of code is to work. In other words, code should accurately and efficiently perform the task that it was designed to complete, in such a way that there are no ambiguities as to how it will behave.
I find beauty in code that I can trust—code that I am confident will produce results that are correct and applicable to my problem. What I am defining here as my first criterion of beautiful code is code that I can use and reuse without any shred of doubt in the code’s ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.