A Discipline of Programming (Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation) | 
 enlarge | Author: E. Dijkstra
Publisher: Prentice Hall, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $87.33
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 441593
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 217
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 013215871X
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.642
EAN: 9780132158718
ASIN: 013215871X
Publication Date: October 28, 1976
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Amazon.com Review
Author Edsger W. Dijkstra introduces A Discipline of Programming with the statement, "My original idea was to publish a number of beautiful algorithms in such a way that the reader could appreciate their beauty." In this classic work, Dijkstra achieves this goal and accomplishes a great deal more. He begins by considering the questions, "What is an algorithm?" and "What are we doing when we program?" These questions lead him to an interesting digression on the semantics of programming languages, which, in turn, leads to essays on programming language constructs, scoping of variables, and array references. Dijkstra then delivers, as promised, a collection of beautiful algorithms. These algorithms are far ranging, covering mathematical computations, various kinds of sorting problems, pattern matching, convex hulls, and more. Because this is an old book, the algorithms presented are sometimes no longer the best available. However, the value in reading A Discipline of Programming is to absorb and understand the way that Dijkstra thought about these problems, which, in some ways, is more valuable than a thousand algorithms.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 How to loop. August 4, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book shows by example that iterative algorithms can be derived - you don't need a lucky inspiration to discover them. If you have ever vacillated between putting something in the initialization or body of a loop; or written a loop that doesn't terminate in some cases; this will change your whole approach to coding.
 excellent December 17, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book in reasoning about programs. It is fairly rigorous and requires a bit of math maturity, and the reader should be warned that formal methods of computer science have evolved quite a bit since 1976. By this I refer to axiomatic program verification and semantics. The key characteristic of this book is that it is built around discussing real world algorithms. This makes the practical consequences of the analysis more evident than in a typical textbook format.
 Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there July 26, 2002
9 out of 15 found this review helpful
I really wanted to get my hands on this book and now that i have (via interlibrary loan) i want to warn folks that this is not light reading. I found a majority of this book very boring and all but impenetrable. I like Dijkstra's English prose, but when he embarks on the math I wish he'd state the point of each set of formulae above them. It would have also helped if he stressed practical uses of his insights vis-a-vis an actual programming language. This "just shows how much I know" I'm sure, but I suspect many people will feel similarly. FYI: My background is Bachelor's in C.S. with a C.S. GPA of 3.87/4.0. A depressing indictment of U.S. education, Dijkstra would say :)
computer science classic September 27, 2001
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
---Coming from no less a person than Dijkstra, this book, though dated takes programming to a different level. It blesses the discipline of programming with the mathematical formalism and begins to look at it as a piece of mathematics. I picked this book while doing my CS undergraduate, and made me fall in love with CS, all over again. It does NOT however talk much about programming techniques or methods! It looks at programs from as formal a view point as possible and builds a framework for constructing 'correct' programs..or more correctly a framework for 'proving the correctness' of a program. It takes you to the point of considering programs as poetry.. Its difficult to contemplate the application of the thoeries developed here into practice, though a lot of it is used in some form or the other, but nonetheless it makes an excellent reading. I recommend it to anybody seriously interested in computer science .
A book about reasoning September 27, 2000
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is not only a book about programming, it is also a book about reasoning on programs, and even a book about reasoning. Treating a program as a formal object, the book discussed its meaning, how to reason about it, and even how to derive it. If you are not a hacker or do not want to be one, you will like this book, and highly possiblely you will read it many times.
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