Skip to Content
Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition
book

Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition

by Jon Bentley
September 1999
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
7h 38m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition

Column 1: Cracking the Oyster

The programmer’s question was simple: “How do I sort a disk file?” Before I tell you how I made my first mistake, let me give you a chance to do better than I did. What would you have said?

1.1 A Friendly Conversation

My mistake was to answer his question. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of how to implement a Merge Sort on disk. My suggestion that he dig into an algorithms text met with less than enthusiasm — he was more concerned about solving the problem than furthering his education. I then told him about a disk sorting program in a popular programming book. The program consisted of about two hundred lines of code in a dozen functions; I estimated that implementing and testing the code would have taken the programmer ...

Become 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,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’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.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI 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.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’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.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'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.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Programming Rust, 2nd Edition

Programming Rust, 2nd Edition

Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, Leonora F. S. Tindall
The Go Programming Language

The Go Programming Language

Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan
Learning Spark, 2nd Edition

Learning Spark, 2nd Edition

Jules S. Damji, Brooke Wenig, Tathagata Das, Denny Lee

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134498058Purchase book