PrefacePrefaceWhat do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?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. [...] Book homepage | Author homepage
— Graham Greene
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