Christos Tranoris

Recently a colleague of mine, remind me of a book that I had bought last summer but I let aside some time ago for other priorities. I picked it up again and I’m still trying to finish it.
The book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think presents ideas and solutions from pioneering software designers.
Although it is hard to read since it needs some expert programming skills, the intention is revolutionary: to motivate and inspire a new generation of coders by sharing their secrets for creating elegantly crafted software.

And indeed they do! While reading the book you can find excellent ideas and solutions on coding style, performance, debugging and testing. Since, many topics are from programmers working on Open Source Software (OSS), you will find yourself (if not already) download the source code of several popular projects, such as SVN, and try to figure out where they do what and why.
While reading this book, I thought how lucky young programmers are today, since they can find excellent programming paradigms from the OSS community. But this needs some “Beautiful tutors” that they will open up young programmers’ mind and guide them through real-life OSS examples. Still, if you are interested in broadening your programming skills, grasp the source code of your favourite program and dig into this!
 A worth mentioned quote from chapter 3: A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Saint-Exupéry)