Why read The Elements of Programming Style?

Book cover of The Elements of Programming Style

Book description

This rounds out a collection of works by Kernighan. Each book of his covers a different aspect of software, in clear form with logical concepts. This book covers the look and feel of the code itself. As with the other works, some concepts have evolved as languages have evolved and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Elements of Programming Style as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Arthur O'Dwyer

Author

This tour de force probably couldn't get written today. Kernighan and Plauger take snippets of Fortran and PL/I code from real, published textbooks and find things to fix about them. Now, many of their specific concerns are relics of the "structured programming" wars of the 1960s (overuse of arithmetic IF and GOTO) or quirks of the programming languages in question (undeclared variables silently getting the wrong type); but this is educational in itself. If you wonder what's so bad about GOTO, or why we need to declare functions and variables before use, this book may enlighten you. And despite its…

From Arthur's list on budding C plus plus software engineer.