Writing Efficient Programs
#881 of 2,654 all-time
Writing Efficient Programs
Jon Bentley
8 people recommended it in 4 threads, 2017–2023.
What people on Hacker News said
Writing Efficient Programs, also by Bentley. I had mentioned it on HN earlier, and someone replied saying they had used it in real life, and it was gold.
Also has a great bunch of "war stories" about performance tuning in real-life, including one in which people, IIRC, improve the performance of quicksort on a supercomputer by 1 million times or some such, by working on tuning as well as architecture and algorithms at several levels of the stack, from the hardware on upwards.
When I started coding for a living in the early 1990s (in an environment where efficiency was paramount), Writing Efficient Programs was gold. I still have it, and I'm glad that to see that it's still valued.
It is about performance tuning of programs at many levels, micro to macro.
Despite its age, I think it is still very worthwhile, just like Programming Pearls.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently? 2017 · 5 recommendations
- Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read? 2023 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? 2020 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code? 2017 · 1 recommendation