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How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. The book includes the following contributions: Beautiful Brevity: Rob Pike's Regular Expression Matcher by Brian Kernighan, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University; Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology by Karl Fogel, editor of QuestionCopyright.org , Co-founder of Cyclic Software, the first company offering commercial CVS support; The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote by Jon Bentley, Avaya Labs Research; Finding Things by Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, co-inventor of XML 1. 0; Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Validators by Elliotte Rusty Harold, Computer Science Department at Polytechnic University, author of Java I/O, Java Network Programming , and XML in a Nutshell (O'Reilly); and, The Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility by Michael Feathers, consultant at Object Mentor, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Prentice Hall). It also includes: Beautiful Tests by Alberto Savoia, Chief Technology Officer, Agitar Software Inc; On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing by Charles Petzold, author Programming Windows and Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (both Microsoft Press); Top Down Operator Precedence by Douglas Crockford, architect at Yahoo! Inc, Founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON; Accelerating Population Count by Henry Warren, currently works on the Blue Gene petaflop computer project Worked for IBM for 41 years; Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom by Ashish Gulhati, Chief Developer of Neomailbox, an Internet privacy service Developer of Cryptonite, an OpenPGP-compatible secure webmail system; and, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl by Lincoln Stein, investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory - develops databases and user interfaces for the Human Genome Project using the Apache server and its module API. It also includes: The Design of the Gene Sorter by Jim Kent, Genome Bioinformatics Group, University of California Santa Cruz; How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination by Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, also distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Piotr Luszczek, Research Professor at the University of Tennessee; Beautiful Numerics by Adam Kolawa, co-founder and CEO of Parasoft; and, The Linux Kernel Driver Model by Greg Kroah-Hartman, SuSE Labs/Novell, Linux kernel maintainer for driver subsystems, author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell , co-author of Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition (O'Reilly). It also includes: Another Level of Indirection by Diomidis Spinellis, Associate Professor at the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; An Examination of Python's Dictionary Implementation by Andrew Kuchling, longtime member of the Python development community, and a director of the Python Software Foundation; Multi-Dimensional Ite