"Just as natural pearls grow from grains of sand that irritate oysters, programming pearls have grown from real problems that have irritated real programmers. With origins beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity, Bentley's pearls offer unique and clever solutions to those nagging problems. Illustrated by programs designed as much for fun as for instruction, the book is filled with lucid and witty descriptions of practical programming techniques and fundamental design principles. It is not at all surprising that Programming Pearls has been so highly valued by programmers at every level of experience."--Jacket.

Part I: Preliminaries.Cracking the oyster -- Aha! Algorithms -- Data structures programs -- Writing correct programs -- A small matter of programming -- Part II: Performance. Perspective on performance -- The back of the envelope -- Algorithm design techniques -- Code tuning -- Squeezing space -- Part III: The product. Sorting -- A sample problem -- Searching -- Heaps -- Strings of Pearls. Pt I: Programming techniques -- Profilers -- Computing primes, using profilers, a specialized profiler, building profilers, principles, problems -- Associative arrays -- Associative arrays in awk, a finite state machine simulator, topological sorting, principles, problems -- Confessions of a coder -- Binary search, selection, a subroutine library, principles, problems -- Self-describing data -- Name-value pairs, provenances in programming, a sorting lab, principles, problems -- pt. II: Tricks of the trade -- Cutting the Gordian knot -- A quiz, some solutions, hints, principles, problems, debugging -- Bumper-sticker computer science -- Coding, user interfaces, debugging, performance, documentation, managing software, miscellaneous rules, principles, problems -- The envelope is back -- A warm-up for cool brains, performance rules of thumb, Little's law, principles, problems, quick calculations in everyday life -- The furbelow memorandum -- The memo, principles -- pt. III: I/O fit for humans -- Little languages -- The pic language, perspective, pic preprocessors, little languages for implementing pic, principles, problems -- Document design -- Tables, three design principles, figures, text, the right medium, principles, problems, a catalog of pet peeves -- Graphic output -- A case study, a sampler of displays, principles, problems, Napoleon's march to Moscow -- A survey of surveys -- The problems of polling, the languages, the pictures, principles, problems -- pt. IV: Algorithms -- A sample of brilliance -- A sampling of sampling algorithms, Floyd's algorithm, random permutations, principles, problems, a big success story -- Selection -- The problem, the program, analysis of run time, principles, problems.