I don't remember who metioned this book or where they did it. I seem to remember it being mentioned by several people. But for one reason or another I decided to order it and I've eventually made my way through to it.

"Beautiful code" is a compilation of 30-something case studies, each chapter written by a different contributing author, describing code or systems they found beautiful. I suppose it is subjective how wide your definition of "beautiful code" is, but some authors describe architectures rather than code, which isn't quite what I'd expect. To me "code" is generally something that happens at the statement/function level, otherwise you call it "design" or "architecture".

The case studies are extremely diverse, you have everything from kernel code to high level systems. As I'm not a kernel hacker I have to say I didn't understand much of the chapter on Linux drivers, but then I get the feeling I'll never grok c types without a mentor or something, the Hungarian notation style variable naming tells me little about their meaning. There's a FreeBSD chapter on filesystem layering, and that's fairly straightforward, then there's a Solaris chapter on thread handling which is interesting, but the code unfortunately is less instructive to me than is the prose (the author's fascination with sewage is also mildly disturbing).

You'll find the code examples in a variety of languages, some familiar (c++, haskell, java, python, ruby), some not directly familiar but partly or mostly understandable (c, c#, javascript, perl, scheme), and some foreign (elisp, fortran, matlab, visual basic). There are two chapters showing implementations of python datastructures (in c) that I found quite interesting, one from the standard library (dictionaries), the other from NumPy (n-dimensional arrays).

It turns out this book is more interesting than I expected. Some of the chapters I'm just not in a position to understand, but many of them are well written and interesting to delve into. I successfully killed 4-5 hours of time in flight and at the airport with it, which is better mileage than I get out of books on tape. What I really like about it is that it's a book for hackers in the trade -- it's a book that shows you stuff, not one that tries to teach you. Which means you get right to the point without the obligation to introduce and prepare you for what you're about to read. It's a lot more like reading a blog.

So then there's the question, is the code that these supposed masters of the trade write more beautiful than yours and mine? Well, not necessarily. In some of the examples presented it's the design that's supposed to make it beautiful, not the code itself. And try as you might to imagine how an expert will wield untold levels of voodoo to problems you and I would love to solve better, most of the time they don't. I guess there isn't all that much hidden magic out there.