Code Reading – The Open Source Perspective

The book 'Code Reading' has been written by Diomidis Spinellis.

This book is the first one to exclusively deal with code reading as a distinct activity. It primarily emphasizes on developing and improvising the Code Reading or comprehending skills of a programmer. The simplest way to learn to write great code is by reading good code. For that, one needs to make a distinction between a good and bad code.

The level of abstraction the programmer can hit upon given a section of code to analyze, depends on his/her code reading skills and perception about the problem. This book helps to enhance these skills.

At the beginning, it briefly introduces the commonly used programming structures and explains how to extract semantic meaning out of them. It talks about different nifty code reading techniques that may be used in the following scenarios –

- Analyzing large bodies of code
- Adding new functionality
- Fixing bugs
- Integrating into new environments
- Code Reuse

It further talks about understanding project build process, following coding standards and conventions, effectively using software documentation to supplement code reading efforts and getting architecture overview from a code in terms of design patterns.

It also describes some of the code reading and browsing tools which can enhance the code reading efficiency. (e.g. Regular expressions, grep for search, diff for difference in files, source navigator for browsing, code beautifiers, runtime tools like profiler – gprof in unix, etc.)

Reading this book will definitely spur interest into the programmers to learn a lot from the existing open source code and make valuable contributions to the open source world in future.