All royalties from this book will be donated to Amnesty International.

IGOT MY FIRST JOB AS A PROGRAMMER IN THE SUMMER OF 1982. Two weeks after I started, one of
the system administrators loaned me Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming
Style (McGraw-Hill) and Wirth’s Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (Prentice Hall).
They were a revelation—for the first time, I saw that programs could be more than just
instructions for computers. They could be as elegant as well-made kitchen cabinets, as
graceful as a suspension bridge, or as eloquent as one of George Orwell’s essays.
Time and again since that summer, I have heard people bemoan the fact that our profession
doesn’t teach students to see this. Architects are taught to look at buildings, and composers
study one another’s scores, but programmers—they look at each other’s work only
when there’s a bug to fix; even then, they try to look at as little as possible. We tell students
to use sensible variable names, introduce them to some basic design patterns, and
then wonder why so much of what they write is so ugly.