Free Geek Sublime: The Beauty Of Code, The Code Of Beauty Ebooks To Download
The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer codingVikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
File Size: 2393 KB
Print Length: 272 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (September 2, 2014)
Publication Date: September 2, 2014
Language: English
ASIN: B00K48BO6M
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #440,762 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #132 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Computers & Technology #221 in Books > Computers & Technology > History & Culture > History #995 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
Readers should expect the majority of this book to be devoted to a detailed discussion of connections between Indian metaphysics and aesthetics and the author's personal approach to creative writing; the tech elements in the book (brief examination of digital logic, functional v object oriented programming, etc) are mostly relegated to their own segregated chapters. This makes one almost feel as if one is reading two entirely separate essays that have been interleaved with each other: an effect that certainly works against the author's apparent intent to explore connections between the worlds of coding and the "sublime."For example, the book's strongest section details the rigorous grammar underlying classical Sanskrit, and mentions in passing the presence of constructs such as recursion/loops/etc that also appear in formal programming languages. It is certainly interesting to argue that if beauty can be produced (despite? because of?) the rigors of Classical Sanskrit (as the author amply demonstrates), similarly rigorous computer code can also be "beautiful." Unfortunately the interleaved organization of the book prevents the author from really developing this argument, and the code section of the book notably lacks any examples of code or algorithms generally thought to be "beautiful". This dearth of examples fundamentally hinders any attempt to develop a meaningful idea of what "beautiful code" is, beyond not being a big ugly mess, let alone explore in a substantive manner possible connections between the austere beauty of Sanskrit on the one hand and programming languages on the other.The author's discussion, towards the end of the book, of the difficulty of good writing also seems to be something of a missed opportunity.
There are at least two aspects to Chandra's book: the parts that apply to modern computerprogramming and coding and the parts that apply principles of Indian philosophy and poetryto coding.Disclaimer: I'm a programmer. I've written code for computers for many years using avariety of programming languages and running on a variety of machines and softwareenvironments. So, I'm reading and viewing some of what is in "Geek sublime" from aspecial point of view. Because I spend a good part of my time reading and trying tounderstand code and trying to make fixes to it, I care more about whether code isunderstandable and modifiable than I do about some notion of elegance or on aestheticqualities based on an external standard or guide. It may also be significant that Iprogram in high level, interpreted languages, mostly Python (https://www.python.org/), butalso a bit in Ruby (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) and Erlang (http://www.erlang.org/).These are languages whose design places emphasis on code that is clean, readable, and easyto debug code over, for example, execution speed or memory usage. I much prefer Python,Ruby, and Erlang over low level, cryptic languages like C and C++, which make reading codeand finding and fixing errors so much more difficult.Having said that, code that has the the qualities of elegance and aesthetics that Chandradiscusses, likely will trend toward readable and modifiable code. However, I say shootfor code that is readable and modifiable and the aesthetics will follow, rather thanaiming for the aesthetic qualities and hoping that the readability and maintainabilityfollow from that.
The title of Vikram Chandra's book, “Geek Sublime,” doesn't give away a lot about its content, and even its subtitle, “The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty,” is somewhat elusive. When you finish this relatively brief book you'll agree that the title is apt, but still regard it as somewhat recondite.Okay, BLUF: the sum of the book is less than the total value of its parts. Chandra, a long-time writer of code, enthralls the reader with his survey of the history of code, the challenges of code-writing, and the argument over whether code can be beautiful. His inside-the-business revelations, e.g., that a lot of code writers don't really understand how computers actually work, can be small epiphanies and also oddly reassuring. That's the first third of the book. The second third is a survey of classical Indian literary aesthetics, focusing on the work of Anandavardhana (9th c.) and Abhinavagupta (10th-11th c.).What? you're asking yourself. It bears pointing out, if you weren't aware, that Chandra is also an acclaimed novelist. And as an Indian by birth, he has clearly an appreciation of his cultural roots. It doesn't necessarily follow that Chandra would be well positioned to write on Indian literary aesthestics, however, since he isn't, so far as I can tell, a scholar of Indian classical literature, but at least to this admittedly uninformed reader, he does a credible job. Although at times the Indian terms and names might cause the eyes to glaze over, this reader was able not only to follow along his discussion, but, in time, enjoy it as much if not more than the section on code-writing.If beauty in code writing was the thesis, and Indian literary aesthetics the antithesis, the final third of the book attempts synthesis.
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty Ask the Bible Geek: Fascinating Answers to Intriguing Questions The Secret Loves of Geek Girls: Expanded Edition The Geek's Guide to Internet Business Success The Nerdy Nummies Cookbook: Sweet Treats for the Geek in All of Us Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share Going Geek Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays on Subversion, Tactical Profanity, and the Power of Media Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon Just a Geek: Unflinchingly honest tales of the search for life, love, and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise Sticky Sublime Homemade Doughnuts: Techniques and Recipes for Making Sublime Doughnuts in Your Home Kitchen A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (Penguin Classics) The Divine Madman: The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime The Six Dharma Gates to the Sublime The Sublime Object of Ideology (The Essential Zizek) Legacies: the Sublime - Mage the Awakening
