This one is REALLY good

Don't give this one to your programming team, they probably won't get it. Don't give it to this year's star programmer, for the same reason. Wait until you find that one kid that always has one more answer than everyone else, and especially the one that has one more question than everyone else. Give that kid this book.

This book is about all that ugly stuff that people take pride in ignoring because it's "low level" and they're way too cool to do anything low. Memory has costs, CPU cycles have costs, they're wasted in different ways, and recovered in different ways. You find out which is which in different ways. That's what this book is about. Basically, it's all that stuff that was too pragmatic for your CS professors and too theoretical for the Computer Eng. teachers - i.e., what you needed and never got.

This book addresses memory usage, stack frames, processor cache, loop fusion and strength reduction, all in down-and-dirty examples. It talks about debuggers, source control, and bug management - the facts of daily business life that coursework rarely addresses.

If a junior zoomer masters what this book has in it, s/he might survive one of my favorite interview questions: Given only a C compiler, no assembler, and full compiler documentation, unwind the stack. If you don't know what "unwind" is, go away; if you read this book, we'll talk.

//wiredweird

Other Reviews

• Good coverage of software maintenance, techniques and tools from personal perspective
• A good book, but not a great one.
• Very good, but, Heisenberg is watching over him.
• This one is REALLY good
• An Inmate's View of Life in an IT Dungeon