I must say I was pretty disappointed with this book. I expected so much more. The lead off piece by Brian Kernighan is the best in the book. I hoped that the rest of the book would at least try to be as good, but other than Matz's essay and perhaps Bently's (I can't remember now) they were mostly drek. Several were agonizingly boring, long fluff pieces about something they worked on that read as histories of the work they did on a piece of software. Very little insight into the creative process or anything else interesting.

For a book with so much potential, it was a huge let down.

There's a critical need for a book on code aesthetics, elegance and comprehensibility that goes beyond simple style guidelines -- this isn't that book. The contributions are uneven, a few border on the incomprehensible, and most are simply not worth the time. There are no revelations or insights to be had.

i regret buying this book. i dont see the beauty of the code nor do i see how many of the contributors think. much of the material described here is accessible else where and probably in a more readable and enjoyable form.

the map reduce article is lame compared to its original version. the authors had to put something in there from google, i felt.

the beautiful concurrency in haskell is overstated.

This book is a mixed box of chocolates. Don't read it expecting a lot of useful ideas on how to improve your code: It's more of a book you read to widen your horizon a bit. Each chapter stands on its own and talks about a different project. Languages include C, Java, Perl, Python, Lisp and others.

Fortunately, most authors don't dwell too much on their definitions of "beautiful" code (a rough consensus appears to be that beautiful code is readable, concise, efficient, and, surprise, does something useful). The meat of this book are code fragments and explanations of the code and algorithms (and their context).

Despite the explanations, several of the chapters left me scratching my head. Understanding and appreciating all of the code (including that from unfamiliar languages and domains) requires a lot of effort.

Curious to see if they'll come up with an "Ugly Code" book next. Should be more fun ("Daily WTF", anyone?) and less pretentious. Plus, I dare say, they could even re-use some of the chapters from this book...

Two older books that you should buy instead:
Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley.
Programmers at Work, by Susan Lammers.