During their education, architects examine thousands of buildings and analyze the critiques of many more, as we noted in The Architecture of Open Source Applications. However, most software engineers only ever get intimately familiar with a small number of programs, typically those they created themselves.
You have the opportunity to learn how 26 seasoned programmers think when they are creating something new by reading this book. All of the programs you'll learn about in this book were created from scratch to address complex issues. In 500 lines of code or fewer, a web server, pedometer, Python interpreter, web-based spreadsheet, and many other apps are developed and documented by their developers so that you can learn from their discoveries and failures.
It focuses on the tiny design choices that programmers make when creating new things. All of the programs in this book that you will read about were created just for this (although several of them were inspired by larger projects that the authors had worked on previously).
