The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers -- Craft Better Code

by Jon Steinhart

A primer on the underlying technologies that allow computer programs to work. Covers topics like computer hardware, combinatorial logic, sequential logic, computer architecture, computer anatomy, and Input/Output.

Many coders are unfamiliar with the underlying technologies that make their programs run. But why should you care when your code appears to work? Because you want it to run well and not be riddled with hard-to-find bugs. You don't want to be in the news because your code had a security problem.

Lots of technical detail is available online but it's not organized or collected into a convenient place. In The Secret Life of Programs, veteran engineer Jonathan E. Steinhart explores--in depth--the foundational concepts that underlie the machine. Subjects like computer hardware, how software behaves on hardware, as well as how people have solved problems using technology over time.

You'll learn:
  •  How the real world is converted into a form that computers understand, like bits, logic, numbers, text, and colors
  •  The fundamental building blocks that make up a computer including logic gates, adders, decoders, registers, and memory
  •  Why designing programs to match computer hardware, especially memory, improves performance
  •  How programs are converted into machine language that computers understand
  •  How software building blocks are combined to create programs like web browsers
  •  Clever tricks for making programs more efficient, like loop invariance, strength reduction, and recursive subdivision
  •  The fundamentals of computer security and machine intelligence
  •  Project design, documentation, scheduling, portability, maintenance, and other practical programming realities.

Learn what really happens when your code runs on the machine and you'll learn to craft better, more efficient code.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Computers, Nonfiction, Coding, Software

504 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 6, 2019

Reviews

[Łukasz Słonina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting position, mainly for programmers starting their carieers, but it would be also valueable for more experienced developers. Very good beginning (theory, hardware) then last chapters are just theory, author perspective on software engineering.

[Fairul · Rating 2 out of 5]

way too tedious. It started ok and then most of the stuff explained here seems to be unfocused and convoluted. I have to google most of them myself since the author explaination either "does not focus to the previous item discussed" or "he only explain it in one sentence". I think author explaination need some more work as i mostly struggle to get by. I actually find myself dragging along while drooling and thinking what the hell is he talking about. The example also seems incomplete and presented in a hard to understand way

i guess the book is only suitable to people with at least 90% knowledge of what he talked about or atleast a com science student. Not for a beginner or self taught programmer at all.

or maybe i am just stupid noob.

[Jay Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the authors’ writing a bit pedantic, but there where some interesting chapters that I enjoyed reading at the end, which stops me giving the book 2 stars.

Even though this book is more current, published in 2019, I would still recommend Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software over this one. Actually, a second edition is soon to be published.

[Vỹ Hồng · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tries to cover everything about how computers work, from the electric components to web applications and machine learning. The book says its main audience are those who just started learning programming, but I think you need to have some experience to maintain your interest. Otherwise, it'll be a slow read (not the enjoyable or beneficial type).

As a professional software engineer, I find the electrical and hardware discussions in the first few chapters quite interesting and well written. I find the second half of the book, starting from chapter 7 (organizing data), extremely dry and boring. The author doesn't do justice to the topics covered in the application layer at all. In fact, I think readers should just skip the second half, or maybe just skim through it.

[Alex Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very ambitious and works most of the time.

[Marco Neves · Rating 3 out of 5]

The usefulness of this book decreases as the book progresses. The initial chapters are good references to some basic topics in computer science, like numeric bases frequently used, memory usage or logic gates.

But as the book progresses, the topics become more complex and are explained more and more lightly to become just small summaries of the topics, often without even the multiple dimensions of the topic or basic presentation of the multiple approaches to the topic.

It would be better to leave some of the topics out and expand more on the topics left as it is done in the initial chapters.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the paper back version of The secret life of programs. I am giving it a 5 out of 5 because I enjoyed it a lot.

If I remember right The secret life of programs takes the reader from the building blocks of a computer logic games and Boolean algebra through programming and security. The whole book was fascinating to me. I only wish I understood what I was reading. I will have to read the book again. Hopefully.

Two of my favorite chapters were the chapter about Security and the chapter about what programs to learn after reading the book. I hope I have that right.

If you want to learn lots of cool information about computers I think you will like The secret life of programs.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

From gates, to architecture, to assembly, to languages and data structures, to algorithms, concurrency, security, AI, and even culture / project management, this book is a wide-breadth stroll through computer science.
The author closes with his observations on work culture, where he rails against developers that place cognitive burdens on their peers by imposing their development preferences on them and/or their shared dev environments (p415). He presses the point further by illustrating a management style that fires developers for doing so (p428). I also found his HR comment amusing (p429) "One more thing to keep in mind if you do end up in a difficult situation at work: Human Resources is not your friend. Their job is not to protect you; it's to protect the company from liability."

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot to try and grab onto in this book. It is also not the easiest of reads. This is because of how much information is packed into it. I have seen reviews that consider this as reasonable for beginning computer science and programming students. There are places I could understand that. And I have to admit that even the parts that were difficult, I gleaned some new understandings. As someone who is trying to learn programming on my own, this might not have been the best first choice for understanding computer science fundamentals, but it was still useful. I have an appreciation of the complexity of computing and an extended list of things that I need to further study.

Favorite chapter: Security.

[Sean Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable book that looks at computers from binary and logic gates up to software development theory. Most of the topics are covered only briefly, but it was enough to get me to do further research online on certain topics.

There are some parts in this book that my eyes simply glazed over because I didn't have a clue what was being talked about, but they weren't frequent enough to ruin my enjoyment.

If you're new to programming/computer science, this book is a good read to get your feet wet and will act as a jumping off point for a variety of topics in the field.

[Elie De Brauwer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book covers a lot of ground and touches a variety of subjects, in the beginning the book follows a clear 'from the ground up narrative' but in the later chapters the book is entering some strange buzzword-bingo-pot-pourri mode where it simply tries to cover waaaaay too much ground (machine intelligence in 28 pages pages any takers ?). The result is that it's quite entertaining to see a lot of things pass by, but if you're not familiar with the subject in question .... then this will not be of that much value.

[Ben Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was truly a good companion to the start of my CS degree. It gave me background in the computer engineering sphere and a solid foundation in many CS topics, and I am already starting to experience many of the lessons this book gives. This also sets you up well to explore the topics you are more interested in.

[Dan Drake · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this, although I think the scope is far too much -- can you really go from voltages and transistors, to buffer overflow attacks, to agile development practices, in a single book? I think there's just a bit too much going on here, and that perhaps a bit more focus would have made this a bit better.

[Saul Rubio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book to read in the first semesters of Computer Science

[Vanessa Van Den Elzen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read if you are interested in learning about how computers work overall. Helped me learn how to be a better programmer. Learned so much!