This is a book that I wish was on my son's required reading list.  Not that his code is hard to read (for someone in their first programming class), but that there are all kinds of bad habits that wouldn't need to be broken if he and his classmates spent some time learning what good code looks like before they started to write their own.



The Art of Readable Code from O'Reilly is a quick, easy read with a lot of useful ideas for new programmers.  It weighs in at 180 pages, but there's a lot of well used whitespace and a number of (mostly on topic) comic panels in those pages making it seem shorter.



Part one covers naming, code layout, and writing comments; parts two and three cover the meat of refactoring; and part four discusses testing and gives an example of applying the ideas in the book to a small coding project.



The book's examples are in C++, Python, Java, and Javascript.  I would have appreciated seeing some examples in other languages as well (haskell or scala might be good candidates), especially where that language might obviate or change the advice given.



Truth in advertising note, O'Reilly sent me a free copy of this book to review.

The Linux Command Line

As a long-time, professional Unix/Linux sysadmin, I spend a lot of time on the commandline. I've grown pretty familiar with it, but I often find that junior teammates don't have the same familiarity. They often grew up in a world of windows and GUIs. That means I spend a lot of time helping them learn the ropes.

When I saw that No Starch Press had published The Linux Command Line, I wanted to take a look and see if it would make a good primer for the new guys on my team. Then, the good folks at No Starch sent me a review copy and I figured I'd better act on it.

This is a decent sized book, weighing in at 430 pages and 36 easily digestible chapters. The writing and layout are pretty good, and there are a ton of examples.

Part One is 10 chapters (~110 pages) that cover the basics: built-ins and simple commands; redirection; command line short-cuts (for bash in emacs-mode); permissions; and processes.

Part Two is 3 chapters that will jumpstart you getting beyond command line use. These talk about: setting and using environment variables and startup files; using vim; and making the command prompt more useful.

Part Three is a bit meatier. This contains 10 chapters covering tools for: package management; networking; working w/ storage media; regular expressions; working with text, and more. A couple of chapters in here seem less than necessary (E.g., Chapter 23 'Compiling Programs') but if you don't need them, you can always skip over them.

Part Four dives into scripting, where the true power of the command line comes out. There are 13 chapters which cover: designing scripts; conditionals; looping; parameters; and more.

My biggest complaint about this book is its bash centricity. It would have been nice to throw in a chapter and some sidebars talking about how other shells differ, or mentioning those parts that only bash provides. Since dash is becoming more frequent on Linux systems, it would seem like a natural comparison to make in the text.

Still, this is a good book on using the Linux Command Line. If you're just getting started with Linux, or you have a friend and/or coworker that needs some help, this is a good place to start.