---
product_id: 4105592
title: "Programming Pearls (ACM Press)"
price: "COP 180021"
currency: COP
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---

# Programming Pearls (ACM Press)

**Price:** COP 180021
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- **What is this?** Programming Pearls (ACM Press)
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## Description

When programmers list their favourite books, Jon Bentley’s collection of programming pearls is commonly included among the classics. Just as natural pearls grow from grains of sand that irritate oysters, programming pearls have grown from real problems that have irritated real programmers. With origins beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity, Bentley’s pearls offer unique and clever solutions to those nagging problems. Illustrated by programs designed as much for fun as for instruction, the book is filled with lucid and witty descriptions of practical programming techniques and fundamental design principles. It is not at all surprising that Programming Pearls has been so highly valued by programmers at every level of experience. What remains the same in this edition is Bentley’s focus on the hard core of programming problems and his delivery of workable solutions to those problems. Whether you are new to Bentley’s classic or are revisiting his work for some fresh insight, the book is sure to make your own list of favourites.

Review: The how-to for profile-based tuning - Bentley's classic, "Programming Pearls", makes an important point, namely that you won't get good performance without careful coding and profile-based tuning. And it's made clearly, concisely and with compelling examples. The choice of language (C), and the choice of problems (those from computer science 101 we all think we know cold) betrays the sophistication of Bentley's analyses. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have a binary search that's holding up your loop. Or your Huffman coding just isn't snappy enough? "How is that possible?", you might say, fresh out of computer-science 201, "Didn't we just prove these algorithms are optimal?" Well yes, asymptotically up to an arbitrary constant multiplier. But this is the real world, and your code needs to go faster. If this sounds like your predicament, pull up a chair and read "Programming Pearls"; if it's not, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Next, fire up your favorite hardware (Sparc or x86 or PowerPC), favorite language (Perl, Java, or even C), favorite release of that language, along with your favorite interpreter or compiler (Hotspot or standard? GCC or Visual C++). And you'll need a profiler; might as well treat yourself to a good one if you're serious. Then fire up your code with a representative range realistic test data and observe what happens. Function by function, byte by byte. Then try to be as clever as Bentley in (a) figuring out why, (b) trying a range of alternatives, and (c) making it all go faster with minor tuning. Typically, you'll find a single bottleneck taking an order of magnitude more time than everything else, and work on that. Repeat until fast enough. As well as this simple, yet surprisingly effective and realistic methodology, Bentley provides a range of concrete tips on making things go faster, from tweaking data structures to unfolding loops (especially precomputing low-order cases) to using accumulators and caching, all with an eye to underlying memory, communication and CPU resources. Real code that has to run fast, like the code that we write at my current company for signal processing, speech recognition and speech synthesis, typically looks like the end-product of Bentley's refactorings. And it gets that way following exactly the path he lays out: analyze the problem, choose the right algorithm (or the right few to evaluate), and then tune it up using profiling. "Programming Pearls" is the beginning of the road. You will need to look elsewhere for topics such as compression for memory saving, numerical algorithms, effective concurrency and memory sharing, efficient buffered I/O, garbage collection, and the wide range of dynamic programming and heuristic techniques.
Review: Little book of gems - If you want to learn about the latest web programming frameworks, design patterns, J2EE, .NET, CSS, RoR, etc. then please stay away from this book. Once you think you mastered it all, became a professional programmer with also a nice CS degree under your belt come back and start to read this book for pure pleasure and wisdom. It is with high probability that you'll have both and more than you could have imagined. Bentley's classic work is still relevant but not in ways most programmers will imagine at the beginning. You'll probably never go and write your own search routines and re-implement classical data structures (you'll use the one that comes with the standard libraries of your language of choice) but you'll always meet some problems which will puzzle you with interesting constraints. This is what Programming Pearls is all about. Study the examples for fun and maybe laugh at them for their simplicity but then remember to applied the strong principles in that book to your daily technical problems (programming related or not).

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #131,482 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #50 in Microsoft Programming (Books) #96 in Software Development (Books) #239 in Computer Software (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 398 Reviews |

## Images

![Programming Pearls (ACM Press) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51WTeW0gmrL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The how-to for profile-based tuning
*by B***R on July 27, 2002*

Bentley's classic, "Programming Pearls", makes an important point, namely that you won't get good performance without careful coding and profile-based tuning. And it's made clearly, concisely and with compelling examples. The choice of language (C), and the choice of problems (those from computer science 101 we all think we know cold) betrays the sophistication of Bentley's analyses. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have a binary search that's holding up your loop. Or your Huffman coding just isn't snappy enough? "How is that possible?", you might say, fresh out of computer-science 201, "Didn't we just prove these algorithms are optimal?" Well yes, asymptotically up to an arbitrary constant multiplier. But this is the real world, and your code needs to go faster. If this sounds like your predicament, pull up a chair and read "Programming Pearls"; if it's not, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Next, fire up your favorite hardware (Sparc or x86 or PowerPC), favorite language (Perl, Java, or even C), favorite release of that language, along with your favorite interpreter or compiler (Hotspot or standard? GCC or Visual C++). And you'll need a profiler; might as well treat yourself to a good one if you're serious. Then fire up your code with a representative range realistic test data and observe what happens. Function by function, byte by byte. Then try to be as clever as Bentley in (a) figuring out why, (b) trying a range of alternatives, and (c) making it all go faster with minor tuning. Typically, you'll find a single bottleneck taking an order of magnitude more time than everything else, and work on that. Repeat until fast enough. As well as this simple, yet surprisingly effective and realistic methodology, Bentley provides a range of concrete tips on making things go faster, from tweaking data structures to unfolding loops (especially precomputing low-order cases) to using accumulators and caching, all with an eye to underlying memory, communication and CPU resources. Real code that has to run fast, like the code that we write at my current company for signal processing, speech recognition and speech synthesis, typically looks like the end-product of Bentley's refactorings. And it gets that way following exactly the path he lays out: analyze the problem, choose the right algorithm (or the right few to evaluate), and then tune it up using profiling. "Programming Pearls" is the beginning of the road. You will need to look elsewhere for topics such as compression for memory saving, numerical algorithms, effective concurrency and memory sharing, efficient buffered I/O, garbage collection, and the wide range of dynamic programming and heuristic techniques.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Little book of gems
*by E***Ç on July 2, 2010*

If you want to learn about the latest web programming frameworks, design patterns, J2EE, .NET, CSS, RoR, etc. then please stay away from this book. Once you think you mastered it all, became a professional programmer with also a nice CS degree under your belt come back and start to read this book for pure pleasure and wisdom. It is with high probability that you'll have both and more than you could have imagined. Bentley's classic work is still relevant but not in ways most programmers will imagine at the beginning. You'll probably never go and write your own search routines and re-implement classical data structures (you'll use the one that comes with the standard libraries of your language of choice) but you'll always meet some problems which will puzzle you with interesting constraints. This is what Programming Pearls is all about. Study the examples for fun and maybe laugh at them for their simplicity but then remember to applied the strong principles in that book to your daily technical problems (programming related or not).

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Makes you think harder
*by A***R on August 19, 2004*

Programming pearls is a compendium of 15 columns previously published in Communications of the ACM. The columns cover a wide range of topics related to programming: from requirements gathering to performance tuning. The focus is primarily on coding techniques and algorithms. Each column has been reorganized as a chapter. Chapters usually start with the presentation of a practical problem. Then various solutions are presented and are used as lessons to be learned. The writing style is clear and fun. Programming Pearls is not a usual book teaching new programming concepts. Although it contains good and sometimes quite novel ideas, the aim of the book is not to teach something new. For example, the search and sort algorithms presented are well-known. The aim is to remind programmers to think hard before starting writing code. The book has great chapter on back-of-the-envelope computation for example which is useful when comparing various solutions. The easy solutions to the column's problems are usually very slow. The `good' solutions are lightening fast but require thinking hard about the problems. I would recommend having a book about algorithms nearby when reading Programming Pearls. The book is full of little (and some not so little) exercises that are given throughout the chapters. Solutions or hints are given at the end. The exercises usually take a few hours to do properly and are a great resource. Again the emphasis is on making the reader think. If you consider programming a repetitious activity, Programming Pearls will provoke you into thinking harder about finding elegant solutions. I recommend this book.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Programming Pearls
- The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey To Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
- Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition

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*Last updated: 2026-05-26*