58bits - Tech

cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers". This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.

http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/cruft.HTML

CLR via C# – another great “roll your sleeves up” book. As the author says, there are a lot of “top down” books out there that will teach you how to use a tool, an application, or a framework, but fewer that will take you on a “bottom up” tour of the underlying technology.

What impressed me most about the book was the constant reference to efficiency and performance issues associated with the CLR and CTS, along with various pitfalls and performance traps that I would have continued to be oblivious of if I had not read this book.

To some extent I think type safety and the managed heap in the CLR may have given me a false sense of security where memory allocation and type design was concerned. There are still many performance pitfalls and many more performance gains to be made by having a deeper understanding of the CLR and CTS

I rank this as one of the best technical books I’ve read to-date. The coverage and depth is impressive. Jeffrey Richter knows his stuff.