Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (v. 1)

You've got a day to add a new feature in a 34,000-line program: Where do you start? How can you understand and simplify an inscrutable piece of code? Where do you start when disentangling a complicated build process? How do you comprehend code that appears to be doing five things in parallel? You may read code because you have to, to fix it, inspect it, or improve it. You may read code the way an engineer examines a machine, to discover what makes it tick. Or you may read code because you are scavenging, looking for material to reuse. Code-reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique you use when is crucial. In this book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.