Write Great Code, Volume 2

Introduction

There are many aspects of great code—far too many to describe properly in a single book. Therefore, this second volume of the Write Great Code series concentrates on one important part of great code: performance. As computer systems have increased in performance from MHz, to hundreds of MHz, to GHz, the performance of computer software has taken a back seat to other concerns. Today, it is not at all uncommon for software engineers to exclaim, “You should never optimize your code!” Funny, you don’t hear too many computer application users making such statements.

Although this book describes how to write efficient code, it is not a book about optimization. Optimization is a phase near the end of the software development cycle in which ...