I got around to reading this very insightful piece about truly beautiful code on coding horror today.

In it, Jeff Atwood talks about the problem with the book Beautiful Code, which is that it actually talks about code and not the ideas behind the code.

To put it succinctly in Jeff’s words …

“Ideas are beautiful. Algorithms are beautiful. Well executed ideas and algorithms are even more beautiful. But the code itself is not beautiful. The beauty of code lies in the architecture, the ideas, the grander algorithms and strategies that code represents”

I just remember thumbing through the book at my local Barnes & Noble and not being enamored of it … I went on to spend 2 hours reading Obie Fernandez’s The Rails Way instead.