A Discipline of Programming

by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 013215871X
• ISBN13: 9780132158718
• Release Date: October 1976
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

How to loop.

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.

computer science classic

---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

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.

Still relevant after all these years

I still have my original copy of this book. It is one of thefew that are not in storage.Many of the concepts (such as the chapters on arrays and verification) are still fresh. The emphasis on developing programs by stepwise refinement has guided much of my own programming...

The finest book that I own.

I purchased A Discipline Of Programming about fifteen years ago, at the start of my programming career. It remains the most important programming book that I own, and possibly the most important book of any kind. Anyone who aspires to be a programmer should spend many hours reading it. It is impossible not to benefit hugely.The (unnamed) language invented by Dijkstra, almost as an aside in the early chapters of the book, is the language in which I would most like to write my programs. Some day perhaps I will be able to.