book

Seriously Good Software

by Marco Faella

March 2020

Intermediate to advanced

328 pages

10h 1m

English

Manning Publications

Read now

Unlock full access

1.1. Software qualities1.2. Mostly external software qualities1.3. Mostly internal software qualities1.4. Interactions between software qualities1.5. Special qualities1.6. The recurring example: A system of water containers1.7. Data model and representations1.8. Hello containers! [Novice]SummaryFurther reading
2.1. The code [Reference]2.2. Memory requirements2.3. Time complexity2.4. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
3.1. Adding water in constant time [Speed1]3.2. Adding connections in constant time [Speed2]3.3. The best balance: Union-find algorithms [Speed3]3.4. Comparing implementations3.5. And now for something completely different3.6. Real-world use cases3.7. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
4.1. Gently squeezing [Memory1]4.2. Plain arrays [Memory2]4.3. Forgoing objects [Memory3]4.4. The black hole [Memory4]4.5. Space-time trade-offs4.6. And now for something completely different4.7. Real-world use cases4.8. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
5.1. Design by contract5.2. Designing containers by contract5.3. Containers that check their contracts [Contracts]5.4. Containers that check their invariants [Invariants]5.5. And now for something completely different5.6. Real-world use cases5.7. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
6.1. Basic testing notions6.2. Testing containers [UnitTests]6.3. Testability [Testable]6.4. And now for something completely different6.5. Real-world use cases6.6. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
7.1. Points of view on readability7.2. Structural readability features7.3. Exterior readability features7.4. Readable containers [Readable]7.5. Final thoughts on readability7.6. And now for something completely different7.7. Real-world use cases7.8. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
8.1. Challenges to thread safety8.2. Dealing with deadlocks8.3. Thread-safe containers [ThreadSafe]8.4. Immutability [Immutable]8.5. And now for something completely different8.6. Real-world use cases8.7. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading
9.1. Establishing boundaries9.2. The general framework9.3. A generic container implementation9.4. General considerations9.5. Recovering water containers [Generic]9.6. Social network posts9.7. And now for something completely different9.8. Real-world use cases9.9. Applying what you learnedSummaryAnswers to quizzes and exercisesFurther reading

Content preview from Seriously Good Software

Chapter 4. Precious memory: Space efficiency

This chapter covers

Writing space-efficient classes
Comparing the memory requirements of common data structures, including arrays, lists, and sets
Assessing trade-offs between performance and memory footprint
Exploiting memory locality to improve performance

Sometimes, programmers need to store their data in as little space as possible. Contrary to intuition, this rarely happens because the device they’re targeting comes with little memory. Rather, it happens because the amount of data is huge. For example, video games are a type of software that often pushes the limits of the hardware. No matter how many GB of memory the next console boasts, soon games will run out of it and start packing data ...