Ongoing Book Review #1: A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

I have been “coding” for several years now. Although I am not a computer science major, I have barely worked in group projects throughout the years which leads to a specific style of coding that I had picked up in high school. I had a steep learning curve in the way I coded for a bigger project when I did a very short internship at a start-up company in Banglore.

This internship tremendously improved the way I coded and structured my projects- be it regularly using GitHub, refactoring code, or using config files to keep track of hyperparameters. However, in my PhD, I do not work in a group at the moment and neither is anyone actively monitoring the way I code as it is not (yet) important.

This makes me feel saturated in the way I code. After asking a professor for some recommendations on writing clean code, he suggested “A Philosophy of Software Design” written by Stanford University professor John Ousterhout.

I would like to share my thoughts through this article as I keep reading the book to motivate me to finish reading the book by writing what I call an “ongoing book review”.

I will edit this article as and when I read a few chapters to share my thoughts about the book.

Stay tuned with me if you like the idea of an “ongoing” book review. I write these articles mostly for myself (to get into the habit of writing) and as an excuse for my friends to connect with me.