How This Book Is Organized
Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan, shows how deep insight into
a language and a problem can lead to a concise and elegant solution.

Chapter 2, Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface As Ontology, by Karl Fogel, starts with a wellchosen
abstraction and demonstrates its unifying effects on the system’s further
development.
Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley, suggests how to measure a
procedure without actually executing it.
Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray, draws together many strands in Computer Science
in an exploration of a problem that is fundamental to many computing tasks.
Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order): Lessons from Designing XML Verifiers, by
Elliotte Rusty Harold, reconciles the often conflicting goals of thoroughness and good
performance.
Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty Through Fragility, by Michael Feathers,
presents an example that breaks the rules and achieves its own elegant solution.
Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia, shows how a broad, creative approach to testing
can not only eliminate bugs but turn you into a better programmer.
Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold, drops down a
level to improve performance while maintaining portability.
Chapter 9, Top Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford, revives an almost forgotten
parsing technique and shows its new relevance to the popular JavaScript language.
Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals
the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem.
Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses
the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make
sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users.
Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination
of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with
modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data.
Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to
produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers.
Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves with Hardware: The Case of Gaussian Elimination, by
Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software
packages to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of
new computing architectures.
Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how
attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN’s widely used mathematical
library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time.

Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller, shows how a disciplined approach to
validating code can reduce the time it takes to track down errors.
Chapter 29, Treating Code As an Essay, by Yukihiro Matsumoto, lays out some challenging
principles that drove his design of the Ruby programming language, and that, by extension,
will help produce better software in general.
Chapter 30, When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World, by Arun Mehta, takes you
on a tour through the astounding interface design choices involved in a text-editing system
that allows people with severe motor disabilities, like Professor Stephen Hawking, to
communicate via a computer.
Chapter 31, Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop, by T. V. Raman, shows how Lisp’s
advice facility can be used with Emacs to address a general need—generating rich spoken
output—that cuts across all aspects of the Emacs environment, without modifying the
underlying source code of a large software system.
Chapter 32, Code in Motion, by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, lists some simple
rules that have unexpectedly strong impacts on programming accuracy.
Chapter 33, Writing Programs for “The Book”, by Brian Hayes, explores the frustrations of
solving a seemingly simple problem in computational geometry, and its surprising
resolution.