Write Great Code, Volume 1, 2nd Edition: Understanding the Machine - Softcover

Hyde, Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 171850036X ISBN 13: 9781718500365

Verlag: No Starch Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Understanding the Machine, the first volume in the landmark Write Great Code series by Randall Hyde, explains the underlying mechanics of how a computer works.

This, the first volume in Randall Hyde's Write Great Code series, dives into machine organization without the extra overhead of learning assembly language programming. Written for high-level language programmers, Understanding the Machine fills in the low-level details of machine organization that are often left out of computer science and engineering courses.

Learn:

How the machine represents numbers, strings, and high-level data structures, so you'll know the inherent cost of using them.

How to organize your data, so the machine can access it efficiently.

How the CPU operates, so you can write code that works the way the machine does.

How I/O devices operate, so you can maximize your application's performance when accessing those devices.

How to best use the memory hierarchy to produce the fastest possible programs.

Great code is efficient code. But before you can write truly efficient code, you must understand how computer systems execute programs and how abstractions in programming languages map to the machine's low-level hardware. After all, compilers don't write the best machine code; programmers do. This book gives you the foundation upon which all great software is built.

NEW IN THIS EDITION, COVERAGE OF:

Programming languages like Swift and Java

Code generation on modern 64-bit CPUs

ARM processors on mobile phones and tablets

Newer peripheral devices

Larger memory systems and large-scale SSDs

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Randall Hyde is the author of The Art of Assembly Language, one of the most highly recommended resources on assembly, and the three volume Write Great Code series (all No Starch Press). He is also the co-author of The Waite Group's MASM 6.0 Bible. He has written for Dr. Dobb's Journal, Byte, as well as professional journals.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO WRITE GREAT CODE

The Write Great Code (WGC) series will teach you how to write code you can be proud of; code that will impress other programmers, satisfy customers, and prove popular with users; and code that people (customers, your boss, and so on) won’t mind paying top dollar to obtain.

In general, the books in the WGC series will discuss how to write software that achieves legendary status, eliciting the awe and admiration of other programmers.

1.1 The Write Great Code Series
Write Great Code, Volume 1: Understanding the Machine (WGC1 hereafter) is the first of six books in the WGC series. Writing great code requires a combination of knowledge, experience, and skill that programmers usually obtain only after years of mistakes and discoveries. The purpose of this series is to share with both new and experienced programmers a few decades’ worth of observations and experience. I hope that these books will help reduce the time and frustration it takes to learn things “the hard way.”

This book, WGC1, fills in the low-level details that are often skimmed over in a typical computer science or engineering curriculum. These details are the foundation for the solutions to many problems, and you can’t write efficient code without this information. Though I’m attempting to keep each book independent, WGC1 might be considered a prerequisite for the subsequent volumes in the series.

Write Great Code, Volume 2: Thinking Low-Level, Writing High-Level (WGC2) immediately applies the knowledge from this book. WGC2 will teach you how to analyze code written in a high-level language to determine the quality of the machine code that a compiler would generate for it. Optimizing compilers don’t always generate the best machine code possible—the statements and data structures you choose in your source files can have a big impact on the efficiency of the compiler’s output. WGC2 will teach you how to write efficient code without resorting to assembly language.

There are many attributes of great code besides efficiency, and the third book in this series, Write Great Code, Volume 3: Engineering Software (WGC3), will cover some of those. WGC3 will discuss software development metaphors, development methologies, types of developers, system documentation, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). WGC3 provides the basis for personal software engineering.

Great code begins with a great design. Write Great Code, Volume 4: Designing Great Code (WGC4), will describe the process of analysis and design (both structured and object-oriented). WGC4 will teach you how to translate an initial concept into a working design for your software systems.

Write Great Code, Volume 5: Great Coding (WGC5) will teach you how to create source code that others can easily read and maintain, as well as how to improve your productivity without the burden of the “busy work” that many software engineering books discuss.

Great code works. Therefore, I’d be remiss not to include a book on testing, debugging, and quality assurance. Few programmers properly test their code. This generally isn’t because they find testing boring or beneath them, but because they don’t know how to test their programs, eradicate defects, and ensure the quality of their code. To help overcome this problem, Write Great Code, Volume 6: Testing, Debugging, and Quality Assurance (WGC6) will describe how to efficiently test your applications without all the drudgery engineers normally associate with this task.

1.2 What This Book Covers
In order to write great code, you need to know how to write efficient code, and to write efficient code, you must understand how computer systems execute programs and how abstractions in programming languages map to the low-level hardware capabilities of the machine.

In the past, learning great coding techniques has required learning assembly language. While this isn’t a bad approach, it’s overkill. Learning assembly language involves learning two related subjects: machine organization, and programming in assembly language. The real benefits of learning assembly language come from the machine organization component. Thus, this book focuses solely on machine organization so you can learn to write great code without the overhead of also learning assembly language.

Machine organization is a subset of computer architecture that covers low-level data types, internal CPU organization, memory organization and access, low-level machine operations, mass storage organization, peripherals, and how computers communicate with the rest of the world. This book concentrates on those parts of computer architecture and machine organization that are visible to the programmer or are helpful for understanding why system architects chose a particular system design. The goal of learning machine organization, and of this book, is not to enable you to design your own CPU or computer system, but to equip you to make the most efficient use of existing computer designs. Let’s do a quick run-through of the specific topics we’ll cover.

Chapters 2, 4, and 5 deal with basic computer data representation— how computers represent signed and unsigned integer values, characters, strings, character sets, real values, fractional values, and other numeric and non-numeric quantities. Without a solid grasp of how computers represent these various data types internally, it’ll be difficult for you to understand why some operations that use these data types are so inefficient.

Chapter 3 discusses binary arithmetic and bit operations used by most modern computer systems. It also offers several insights into how you can write better code by using arithmetic and logical operations in ways not normally taught in beginning programming courses. Learning these kinds of standard “tricks” is part of how you become a great programmer.

Chapter 6 introduces memory, discussing how the computer accesses its memory and describing characteristics of memory performance. This chapter also covers various machine code addressing modes, which CPUs use to access different types of data structures in memory. In modern applications, poor performance often occurs because the programmer, unaware of the ramifications of memory access in their programs, creates bottlenecks. Chapter 6 addresses many of these ramifications.

Chapter 7 returns to data types and representation by covering composite data types and memory objects: pointers, arrays, records, structures, and unions. All too often, programmers use large composite data structures without even considering the memory and performance impact of doing so. The low-level description of these high-level composite data types will make clear their inherent costs, so you can use them sparingly and wisely.

Chapter 8 discusses Boolean logic and digital design. This chapter provides the mathematical and logical background you’ll need to under- stand the design of CPUs and other computer system components. In particular, this chapter discusses how to optimize Boolean expressions, such as those found in common high-level programming language statements like if and while.

Continuing the hardware discussion from Chapter 8, Chapter 9 discusses CPU architecture. A basic understanding of CPU design and operation is essential if you want to write great code. By writing your code in a manner consistent with how a CPU will execute it, you’ll get much better performance using fewer system...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: No Starch Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 171850036X
• ISBN 13: 9781718500365
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 472
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland