Programming - Write Great Code, Volume 2 Thinking Low Level Writing High Level

This book doesn’t teach anything revolutionary. It describes a time-tested, well-proven approach to writing great code—to make sure you understand how the code you write will actually execute on a real machine. Programmers with a few decades of experience will probably find themselves nodding in recognition as they read this book. If they haven’t seen a lot of code written by younger programmers who’ve never really mastered this material, they might even write it off. This book (and Volume 1 of this series) attempts to fill the gaps in the education of the current generation of programmers, so they can write quality code, too. This particular volume of the Write Great Code series will teach you the following concepts: ●Why it’s important to consider the low-level execution of your high-level programs ●How compilers generate machine code from high-level language (HLL) statements 2 Chapter 1 ●How compilers represent various data types using low-level, primitive, data types ●How to write your HLL code to help the compiler produce better machine code ●How to take advantage of a compiler’s optimization facilities ●How to “think” in assembly language (low-level terms) while writing HLL code The journey to understanding begins with this chapter. In it, we’ll explore the following topics: ●Misconceptions programmers have about the code quality produced by typical compilers ●Why learning assembly language is still a good idea ●How to think in low-level terms while writing HLL code ●What you should know before reading this book ●How this book is organized ●And last, but not least, what constitutes great code So without further ado, let’s begin!