It's a real hodgepodge. ( )

A mixed bag, but overall, worth reading.

Pros: I think programmers do not spend enough time studying the code of others, so books like this are an important step in encouraging the study of this craft. Each chapter of the book is written by a different (often famous) programmer, uses a different language, and discusses a different domain, so you get to see a huge range of different types of code. Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, Beautiful Concurrency, and Writing Programs for the "Book" were my favorite chapters.

Cons: given all the different authors, the quality of the chapters is uneven. A few are boring; a few are interesting, but very tough to follow; a few just discuss high level principles and don't show much code. Also, while I recognize that beauty is subjective, for a prompt of "what's the most beautiful code you've ever seen", a few of the code snippets were questionable. ( )

Nice bird's-eye view of some cool software people are writing, and some common advice for writing clear, maintainable code. Not very original or deep for learning something new, but interesting and inspiring. ( )

Essentially, this is thirty or so authors' takes on what makes code beautiful. The approaches vary widely, as does the writing. Some essays are full of code, others of theory, still others mix the two. There are a handful I'd not call beautiful. This is rough and slow reading, and a very long book.

Parts are over my head, of course; the book's clearly intended that way. But parts are just wonderful, and make the book worthwhile. I'm guessing each reader will prefer different essays.

This short review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. ( )

There are a couple of real gems in here, mostly from people that I would expect, although a couple from people I hadn't heard of before. Then there are a bunch of people that seemed so enamored with their entire project they couldn't boil the essay down to a real message. My suggestion is to borrow it from someone and read until you lose interest and then skip to the next one. I guess the good part is that point will be different for everyone so there is a good chance there is something in here you will enjoy. Personally I would have cut it down to about a third of the size though.