[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Courses explaining well-written codebases?
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       Ask HN: Courses explaining well-written codebases?
        
       There are thousands of courses teaching people programming - some
       of these have become big businesses (plural sight, educative etc).
       But most of these are aimed at beginners. Some intermediate at
       best.  Are there courses that take well architected, well written
       codebases and explain the design principles, coding principles etc
       of such codebases?
        
       Author : akudha
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2022-07-30 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
       | pkrumins wrote:
       | There's no such thing as a well written codebase. There's only
       | code you wish you wrote and actual code that is deployed to
       | production.
        
       | tracerbulletx wrote:
       | It would be nice to see more software project case studies as a
       | genre.
        
       | jerjerjer wrote:
       | > well architected, well written codebases
       | 
       | Not a lot of that, tbqh.
       | 
       | Check the PostgreSQL codebase. One of the cleanest big codebases
       | around. Here's a list of resources for devs:
       | https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ#What_informat...
       | 
       | Also, what are your goals? Understanding ugly written, barely
       | working, and badly designed codebases is a much more useful
       | skill.
        
       | NovaX wrote:
       | "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" is a classic book
       | that was walks through Minix. It was a commonly used as a follow
       | up course with projects to modify its code. Due to the author
       | wanting to keep it dedicated towards education rather than real
       | systems, it did not become a professional project but did inspire
       | Linux' creation. There are similar books for other OSes, such as
       | BSD and Solaris.
       | 
       | A broader but less detailed approach for casual readers are the
       | books "Beautiful Code" and "The Architecture of Open Source
       | Applications".
        
         | a-dub wrote:
         | also "lions commentary on unix" does the same, but with 6th
         | edition unix if you're feeling like a "great books" approach to
         | operating system software design.
        
       | rmk wrote:
       | I started reading this book, but lost interest pretty quickly.
       | Maybe you'll like it if you give it a shot:
       | https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/...
       | 
       | Effective Java by Joshua Bloch has code snippets that are very
       | well-written, as are the examples in The Go Programming Language
       | by Donovan et. al. I read practically all the code in Effective
       | Java, and a lot of the examples in The Go Programming Language (I
       | keep dipping into this book every now and then as I have to learn
       | some aspect of Go, which I use at work; I think I may actually
       | sit down and read this book cover-to-cover and perhaps play with
       | most of the examples).
       | 
       | If you know C, you may want to give the examples in The C
       | Programming Language by Kernighan et. al a go. The examples are
       | written in a bit of an archaic dialect but still very clear.
       | 
       | Another book of note that is funny and engaging (but of course
       | not something that has professional value) is If Hemingway Wrote
       | Code by Angus Croll: https://nostarch.com/hemingway. I think I
       | have read all of the code in this book.
        
       | a-dub wrote:
       | a lot of gnu software is excellent to read, although sometimes
       | portability concerns can obfuscate it a bit.
       | 
       | codebases written in functional languages are also good. in
       | general, when there's a higher barrier to entry, higher quality
       | work is more prevalent.
       | 
       | consider spending some time teaching yourself how to find the
       | best codebase that solves a particular problem. not only does
       | that give you leverage for more learning down the line, it also
       | helps you to develop the much more directly valuable skill of
       | selecting good technology (and detecting crap before it's too
       | late).
        
       | iman453 wrote:
       | I'd come across https://codecatalog.org. I wish there were more
       | of these kind of resources.
        
         | kingkongjaffa wrote:
         | This is really nice, thank you for sharing!
        
       | jfrd wrote:
       | Check out PBRT, an academy award winning book about a rendering
       | codebase!
       | 
       | https://pbrt.org/
        
       | zegerius wrote:
       | I always recommend The Architecture of Open Source Applications
       | [0], it contains some really interesting stories. And it's free!
       | 
       | [0] http://aosabook.org
        
       | billfruit wrote:
       | I'd be more interested in a course focused on the history of the
       | development of a real software product from the industry.
        
       | wizwit999 wrote:
       | I think Sourcegraph had a written series on this, can't remember
       | the name.
        
         | jdorfman wrote:
         | We recently launched a newsletter called Tour de Source that
         | dives into the source code of open source projects and how they
         | work. So far we have Caddy and TS ESLint and a few in the pipe.
         | 
         | https://tourdesource.substack.com/
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-30 23:02 UTC)