Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective

Spinellis (Athens University) outlines strategies for reading computer code written by other programmers, and identifies common C control structures, building blocks, idioms, and pitfalls. He examines the mechanisms of control flow, the organization and coding standards of large projects, different software architectures and design patterns, and tools for automating tasks. The final chapter demonstrates how to locate a moon phase algorithm in the NetBSD source code base. The CD-ROM contains source code and examples. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Diomidis Spinellis has been developing the concepts presented in this book since 1985, while also writing groundbreaking software applications and working on multimillion-line code bases. Spinellis holds an M.Eng. degree in software engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from Imperial College London. Currently he is an associate professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business.