Stepanov and McJones: Elements of Programming

Alex Stepanov and Paul McJones's Elements of Programming has been published by Pearson/Addison Wesley. I picked up a copy at the Siggraph conference in New Orleans and skimmed it on the plane home. Under the covers it's an apologia for STL, and as such will doubtless stir debate. Examples are written in an extremely spare dialect of C++.

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There's an interview with

There's an interview with the authors at the publisher's website.

Paul: Mathematicians have created a large taxonomy of concepts. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how to adapt part of the taxonomy to organize software components.

Book website

The book has an own website, with sample chapter, errata, etc.

Free Elements of Programming PDF now available

After almost 10 years in print, Addison-Wesley elected to stop reprinting Elements of Programming and has returned the rights to us. We released an “Authors’ Edition” in two versions:

1. A free PDF

2. A trade paperback from our imprint, Semigroup Press

The text is unchanged from the previous printing, except for corrections for all errata reported to us. See http://www.elementsofprogramming.com/ .

A lovely book

I bought a copy of The Elements Of Programming shortly after it came out. It was one of the first books to open my eyes to the deep connections between programming language design and mathematics, to help me see mathematics not just as something to be modeled by code, but something to describe (and guide) the design of code itself.

Thank you both, twice over: once for writing the book, and again for making it freely available. I hope that many others will find the value and pleasure in reading it that I did.