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500 Lines or Less
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
-- Richard Feynman
This is the source for the book 500 Lines or Less, the fourth in the
Architecture of Open Source Applications series. As
with other books in the series, all written material will be covered by the
Creative Commons - Attribution license, and all code by the MIT License: please
see the license description for details. In addition, all
royalties from paid-for versions will all go to Amnesty International.
The production of this book has been made possible by the financial support of
PagerDuty.
Mission
Every architect studies family homes, apartments, schools, and other common
types of buildings during her training. Equally, every programmer ought to
know how a compiler turns text into instructions, how a spreadsheet updates
cells, and how a database efficiently persists data.
Previous books in the AOSA series have done this by describing the high-level
architecture of several mature open-source projects. While the lessons learned
from those stories are valuable, they are sometimes difficult to absorb for
programmers who have not yet had to build anything at that scale.
"500 Lines or Less" focuses on the design decisions and tradeoffs that
experienced programmers make when they are writing code:
Why divide the application into these particular modules with these
particular interfaces?
Why use inheritance here and composition there?
How do we predict where our program might need to be extended, and how can
we make that easy for other programmers?
Each chapter consists of a walkthrough of a program that solves a canonical
problem in software engineering in at most 500 source lines of code. We hope
that the material in this book will help readers understand the varied
approaches that engineers take when solving problems in different domains, and
will serve as a basis for projects that extend or modify the contributions
here.
Contributors
Name
Affiliation
Project
Online
GitHub
Mike DiBernardo
Wave
editorial
@mdibernardo
mikedebo.ca
MichaelDiBernardo
Amy Brown
indie
editorial
amyrbrown.ca
@amyrbrown
amyrbrown
Allison Kaptur
Dropbox
byterun
@akaptur
akaptur
Audrey Tang
g0v.tw, Socialtext, Apple
spreadsheet
@audreyt
audreyt
Brandon Rhodes
Dropbox
contingent
@brandon_rhodes
brandon-rhodes
Carl Friedrich Bolz
King's College London
object model
cfbolz.de
@cfbolz
cfbolz
Cate Huston
Image Filter app
www.accidentallyincode.com/
@catehstn
catehstn
Christian Muise
University of Melbourne
flow-shop
@cjmuise
haz
Daniel Jackson
same-origin-policy
Daniel Rocco
BrightLink Technology
contingent
@drocco007
drocco007
Dann Toliver
Bento Box
dagoba
danntoliver.com
@dann
dxnn
Dessy Daskalov
Nudge Rewards
Pedometer
www.dessydaskalov.com
@dess_e
dessy
Dethe Elza
blockcode
dethe
Dustin Mitchell
Mozilla
cluster
djmitche
Erick Dransch
Modeller
@ErickDransch
EkkiD
Eunsuk Kang
same-origin-policy
Greg Wilson
web-server
@gvwilson
gvwilson
Guido van Rossum
Dropbox
crawler
@gvanrossum
gvanrossum
A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
MongoDB
crawler
@jessejiryudavis
ajdavis
Jessica Hamrick
University of California, Berkeley
sampler
www.jesshamrick.com
@jhamrick
jhamrick
Leah Hanson
Google
static analysis
@astrieanna
astrieanna
Leo Zovic
event-web-framework
Malini Das
Twitch
ci
malinidas.com
@malinidas
malini
Marina Samuel
Mozilla
ocr
www.marinasamuel.com
@emtwos
emtwo
Ned Batchelder
edX
templating engine
nedbatchelder.com
@nedbat
nedbat
Santiago Perez De Rosso
same-origin-policy
Taavi Burns
Previously at Points, now at PagerDuty
data-store
@jaaaarel
taavi
Yoav Rubin
Microsoft
In-memory functional database
@yoavrubin
yoavrubin
Technical Reviewers
Amber Yust
Andrew Gwozdziewycz
Andrew Kuchling
Andrew Svetlov
Andy Shen
Anton Beloglazov
Ben Trofatter
Borys Pierov
Carise Fernandez
Charles Stanhope
Chris Atlee
Chris Seaton
Cyryl Płotnicki-Chudyk
Dan Langer
Dan Shapiro
David Pokorny
Eric Bouwers
Frederic De Groef
Graham Lee
Gregory Eric Sanderson
James O'Beirne
Jan de Baat
Jana Beck
Jessica McKellar
Jo Van Eyck
Joel Crocker
Johan Thelin
Johannes Fürmann
John Morrissey
Joseph Kaptur
Josh Crompton
Joshua T. Corbin
Kevin Huang
Maggie Zhou
Marc Towler
Marcin Milewski
Marco Lancini
Mark Reid
Matthias Bussonni
Read the full README on GitHub