A Method of Programming

by Edsger W. Dijkstra, W.H. Feijen

English, Dutch (translation)

Genres: Computer Science, Programming, Nonfiction, Technical

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1988

About the author

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor.

His influential 1968 paper "A Case against the GO TO Statement", later published by Niklaus Wirth with the title "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", introduced the phrase "considered harmful" into computing.

Reviews

[Mauricio Cap]

The book you MUST read if you want to program in any language.
So you don't go shamefully changing values or debugging line by line because you can't understand even your own code, even just after you wrote it ...

(the title is "A Method of programming", as seen in the cover image)

[Max Lybbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is meant as the text for an introductory programming course. As a relatively experienced programmer, I found the book full of great material that I can put to practical use. It does take some work to translate the programs from the imaginary language used in the book to something from the real world, but the concepts and techniques presented are much more easily applied.