February 1999
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
9h 18m
English
Content preview from The Practice of ProgrammingBecome 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,
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Chapter 7: Performance
His promises were, as he then was, mighty; But his performance, as he is now, nothing.
Shakespeare, King Henry VIII
Long ago, programmers went to great effort to make their programs efficient because computers were slow and expensive. Today, machines are much cheaper and faster, so the need for absolute efficiency is greatly reduced. Is it still worth worrying about performance?
Yes, but only if the problem is important, the program is genuinely too slow, and there is some expectation that it can be made faster while maintaining correctness, robustness, and clarity. A fast program that gets the wrong answer doesn’t save any time.
Thus the first principle of optimization is don’t. Is the program good enough already? Knowing ...
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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.