code reading dds

Code ReadingPreface

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?
— Graham Greene

The reading of code is likely to be one of the most common activities of a computing professional, yet it is seldom taught as a subject or formally used as a method for learning how to design and program.

One reason for this sad situation originally may have been the lack of real-world or high-quality code to read. Companies often protect source code as a trade secret and rarely allow others to read, comment on, experiment with, and learn from it. In the few cases where important proprietary code was allowed out of a company's closet, it spurred enormous interest and creative advancements. As an example, a generation of programmers benefited from John Lions's Commentary on the Unix Operating System that listed and annotated the complete source code of the sixth-edition Unix kernel. Although Lions's book was originally written under a grant from AT&T for use in an operating system course and was not available to the general public, copies of it circulated for years as bootleg nth-generation photocopies.

In the last few years, however, the popularity of open-source software has provided us with a large body of code we can all freely read. Some of the most popular software systems used today, such as the Apache Web server, the Perl language, the GNU/Linux operating system, the BIND domain name server, and the sendmail mail-transfer agent are in fact available in open-source form. I was thus fortunate to be able to use open-source software such as the above to write this book as a primer and reader for software code. My goal was to provide background knowledge and techniques for reading code written by others. By using real-life examples taken out of working, open-source projects, I tried to cover most concepts related to code that are likely to appear before a software developer's eyes, including programming constructs, data types, data structures, control flow, project organization, coding standards, documentation, and architectures. A companion title to this book will cover interfacing and application-oriented code, including the issues of internationalization and portability, the elements of commonly used libraries and operating systems, low-level code, domain-specific and declarative languages, scripting languages, and mixed language systems.

This book is — as far as I know — the first one to exclusively deal with code reading as a distinct activity, one worthy on its own. As such I am sure that there will be inevitable shortcomings, better ways some of its contents could have been treated, and important material I have missed. I firmly believe that the reading of code should be both properly taught and used as a method for improving one's programming abilities. I therefore hope this book will spur interest to include code-reading courses, activities, and exercises into the computing education curriculum so that in a few years our students will learn from existing open-source systems, just as their peers studying a language learn from the great literature.

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Last modified: 2003.05.12