Two recent books caught my attention. I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who’s read either of them. Both of them are “big picture” programming books and both are from O’Reilly.

The first book is “Beautiful Code” edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson. Each chapter is a case study on code design with 33 chapters total. The chapters span many programming languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Haskell, Scheme and more) and many are by heavy-hitters in the programming world like Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Douglas Crockford (JSON), Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell), Brian Kernighan (Unix, C, AWK), and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby). It just came out in June but has been getting great reviews.

O’Reilly describes it like this:

“How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.”

Safari Books Online has posted an interview with Oram and Wilson about the book. O’Reilly has also launched a related web site which is for further discussing the projects in Beautiful Code and other similar projects.

The second book is “Programming Collective Intelligence” by Toby Segaran. It was just released this month.

O’Reilly describes it like this:

“Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it.”

Tim O’Reilly wrote a thought-provoking blog post in support of the book where he asserts that the power of the “Web 2.0 revolution” doesn’t lie in user-submitted content or Ajax-powered interfaces but in the ability to “harness collective intelligence”. (I’d argue that it’s all three, but his point is well-taken.) He defines “Web 2.0″ as: “the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” To do that programmers have to extract meaning from mountains of data. They have to shape it using their own intelligence—take the noise and make it signal. “Programming Collective Intelligence” attempts to teach the techniques and algorithms to get started.

I just ordered them both. I’m not sure if they will make for good vacation reading, but I’m sure they will be good airplane-on-the-way-to-vacation reading. (If they arrive in time, both of them aren’t shipping immediately.) If you order them direct from O’Reilly, they are offering a “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” special (I picked “Mastering Regular Expressions”) and orders over $30 get free shipping. (And don’t forget that it might be considered a business expense…)

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