I’ve read this book when I started my PhD thesis. It helped me laying down the basis of software conception.
It was the first book where I found the code smell concept. And my former code really smelt…
Month: April 2009
If last week’s book review was too complicated for you, perhaps this book is more suited for you. Less design patterns, but a funnier way to describe them.
As I’ve said before, I’ve done several book reviews in the past. I will start with a small serie on design patterns books.
This book is one of the “must-have” in your library. If you write some code or if you manage some IT or Computer Science projects, you will have this book to lay down the basic software architecture.
Profiling comes in three different flaviors. The first is emulation, where a processor behavior is emulated, the second is sampling, where at regular intervals, the profiler samples the status of a program, and fianlly instrulentation, where the profiler gets information when a subroutine is called and when it returns. As with the Heisenberg uncertainty, profiling changes the exact behavior of your program. This is something you have to remember when analyzing a profile.
Valgrind is an Open Source emulation profiler. It is freely available on standard Linux platforms. As it is an emulation, it is far slower than the actual program. This means that the I/O are underestimated. The advantage is that you can have every detail on the memory behavior (cache misses for instance). Valgrind does not emulate all processors, but you can tweak it to approach your own one.