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by Frans Bouma.
Original Post: Do not read just code, learn algorithms.
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Joseph Cooney wonders which sourcecode should be read by a programmer to learn to become a better programmer. I'd say: none. At least, not the code for which you don't have the design documents or algorithm descriptions. A lot of code is very bad and it's pretty useless to just read code. The reason for that is that code is the end phase of programming software. What's way more important is the algorithm or set of algorithms the code has to represent. Only then you can learn something, because you can then see the start (algorithm) and end (code) of a transition every developer has to make a lot of times. Only with the algorithms in your hand you can check if the code you're reading is good code or not: if it doesn't describe / represent the algorithm(s) it has to represent, the code is buggy, bad and should be rewritten. You don't know that if you read sourcecode without the algorithm descriptions.
Some developers like to read other people's code to learn 'new tricks'. If a developer says that to you, you immediately know the developer doesn't understand what software engineering is all about. Software engineering and programming isn't about 'tricks'. It's about algorithms and their implementations in sourcecode. The more 'tricks' are used to implement an algorithm, the more an implementation will become unmaintainable and more complicated to understand, while an algorithm is describable in normal text, so the sourcecode should be as simple as the algorithm description. Yes, this results often in dull code, which is not the stuff the developer looking for tricks will get exited about. He/she will probably describe the code as 'not that good', because no trick is used.
If you want to learn something, read the book 'Algorithms' by Robert Sedgewick. Very old (1988), but very good and very real even today. The code is in C, but what's important is to learn to write these algorithms in VB.NET or C# so you'll learn these algorithms back to forth and back so next time in your own code you can make the better decisions. Last time I read it was in 1991 and I opened it last week again, what a wealth of information.
Looking at other people's code, just to learn things is, in my humble opinion, more or less a waste of time. Look at the theory behind the code, you'll learn much more from that. "Why" is it constructed that way, is way more important than "How" is it constructed. And trust me, the Why is not picked up from sourcecode, but from the algorithms the code has to represent.
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