The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: Echoing the previous reviewer's sentiments, I expected to learn more about the person. Instead, you get some short articles (of uneven quality) by his students. Remarkably, the one most aligned with my current job--the Clint network--was the one I found most tedious.

As a minor plus, the book has a really *nice* cover.

I donated my copy to the local library.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I purchased this book with the hope of gaining some insight into Niklaus Wirth as a person and an educator. Wirth has made many contributions to the computer science field, so I was hoping for tales from his students and close friends that would relate some of the man behind the magic.

Instead the book reads very much like the proceedings of a technical conference (without a well-defined topic). In fact, many of the essays only relate to the book in that the authors were students of Wirth (or really appreciated his accomplishments) and they thanked Wirth in the introduction and conclusion. I did find a number of the essays to be interesting but I imagine that I could have found a very similar technical paper by searching the ACM or IEEE libraries.

There were few actual insights into Wirth as a person and little discussion of him as an educator. The overriding theme is, of course, that Wirth is a strong proponent of simplicity (it says as much in the title). However, the tie-ins to this theme in each essay usually amounted to simply stating that Wirth demanded simple solutions. A few essays did give some examples such as suggesting the use of simpler algorithms (that are good enough) in lieu of more complicated (and error-prone) but faster algorithms. However, a number of articles reported the number of lines of code and the number of different modules as proof of simplicity.

The book wasn't bad but it wasn't what I was hoping for (what ever is?) or what I had expected.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I purchased this book with the hope of gaining some insight into Niklaus Wirth as a person and an educator. Wirth has made many contributions to the computer science field, so I was hoping for tales from his students and close friends that would relate some of the man behind the magic.

Instead the book reads very much like the proceedings of a technical conference (without a well-defined topic). In fact, many of the essays only relate to the book in that the authors were students of Wirth (or really appreciated his accomplishments) and they thanked Wirth in the introduction and conclusion. I did find a number of the essays to be interesting but I imagine that I could have found a very similar technical paper by searching the ACM or IEEE libraries.

There were few actual insights into Wirth as a person and little discussion of him as an educator. The overriding theme is, of course, that Wirth is a strong proponent of simplicity (it says as much in the title). However, the tie-ins to this theme in each essay usually amounted to simply stating that Wirth demanded simple solutions. A few essays did give some examples such as suggesting the use of simpler algorithms (that are good enough) in lieu of more complicated (and error-prone) but faster algorithms. However, a number of articles reported the number of lines of code and the number of different modules as proof of simplicity.

The book wasn't bad but it wasn't what I was hoping for (what ever is?) or what I had expected.

Rating:
Summary: Almost really interesting
Review: This book is a disappointment, but it was very close to good. The articles are mostly anecdotes and project descriptions by Wirth's students. I, too, was expecting more direct descriptions of Wirth's teachings. The glimpses shown here were almost enough, but in the end, unsatisfying.

I'm giving it three stars. If you will do anything to learn more about Wirth, you should certainly read this. For general programming insights of similar ilk other books, such as The Practice of Programming or Meyer's Object-oriented Software Construction, are better places to look.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Inspiring Book
Review: This is the first nerd-book that I've read in a _long_ time that I could call inspiring. It got me back to my roots of computer science and applying Occam's razor to everything I see, think, or do. I only gave this a 4 star because one of the chapters is not congruent with the goals of the book. Chalk that up to the ego of that author and ignore it. The rest is great.

If you are an older generation software engineer and feel like you are drowning in the needless complexity of modern day languages like C++, perl, or java, then I think you owe it to yourself to give this book a try.

If you are a newer generation software engineer and haven't seen what some of your predecessors were doing before and around the time of your birth, then you REALLY owe it to yourself to give this book a try.

I was born the same month as Smalltalk. It's one of my favorite languages. When were YOU born?