code > recommended reading
articles
- Cracking budget encryption
- Seen those budget "encrypted" external hard drives? Well the encryption usually isn't so hot. Here's how one was cracked. This is often the closest you'll get to real crypto cracking.
- How phpBB.com got Hacked
- Complete walkthrough of a real hack on a popular, live site.
- Practical Defense in Depth
- An article outlining some of the techniques used by Microsoft (and OS products) to make exploiting C/C++ code more difficult.
- Enough With The Rainbow Tables: What You Need To Know About Secure Password Schemes
- Why you want a nice, slow hash function for your password storage, and some suggestions for which to choose.
- I Didn't Order That, So Why Is It On My Bill, Episode 2
- A great article on minutia of C++ STL string implementation and how it can - aw screw it no one is reading this. If you tell me you read it, I'll give you $5.
- Performance Implications of try/catch/finally
- Peter Ritchie explains that the compiler cannot entirely optimize inside try blocks, so there is a negative performance impact to them sometimes.
- With a little help from your compiler
- Robert Love has an old (4+ years) blog post about gcc compiler extensions and optimizations.
- A regular expression to check for prime numbers
- Would you believe you could write a regular expression that would detect if a number was prime? Well you can. Avinash explains how it works here.
- Pointers, arrays, and string literals
- An example of a C (or C++) gotcha. I'll take this moment to recommend Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden
- MySQL Doesn't Always Suck; This Time it's AMD
- A great blog post from a great blog about getting nice a low level with the processor. I read an article a long time ago, about a music-serving infrastructure (I think) where the software was more reliable than the hardware. Getting to that level in a software project is incredible. Here's another, similar, tale.
- How .Net Regular Expressions Really Work
- If you've ever wonder just what the heck goes on behind "http://([^\s/]+)/?" - this article will answer your questions. It's a really good insight into complicated code. He links to dozens of other pages, but one that was particurally interesting was Runaway Regular Expressions.
- Optimising strlen
- Another awesome blog post about micro-optimisations and the power they have. If you're rewriting strlen you're incredibly dangerous - because you're either incredibly good, or incredibly bad. This guy is good.
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Integration is a pretty common method, amoung good software shops, where people check in their code, the build is automated, and prefferably some tests are run. If someone breaks the build, you know about it early. Continuous Deployment is taking it one step further. After the tests pass: the code is pushed to production automatically. Sound crazy? Read the article.
- Interview with an Adware Author
- An interview with a guy who wrote some crazy-awesome code to keep the adware running. Amazing polling and process monitoring. Explains why it's so hard to get rid of some of the stuff.
- Fastest Way To Code a Loop in Javascript
- Some well-intentioned guy does all the grunt work to help you optimize that annoying long-running javascript code.
- Why there will always be bugs
- That's not the name of the article, but that's what I got out of it. Even if you use some powerful framework that abstracts away so much of the nitty gritty - even if you use Space Shuttle-style development with everything code reviewed and controled - you will always get screwed. Sometimes it might just be by leap seconds.
- The Old New Thing > The cost-benefit analysis of bitfields for a collection of booleans
- You probably know that premature optimization is the root of all evil. But seriously, it is. This article should make you think more critically about your code, question even the most mundane of practices, and most of all - humble you into realizing that there is so much about coding you don't know.
- Strategy: Facebook Tweaks to Handle 6 Time as Many Memcached Requests
- An article about how Facebook scaled up memcached about 25%. 25% doesn't sound like a lot, but it's not trivial. The interesting part is how they did it. They went all the way up and down the entire stack to find the bottlenecks everywhere - not just memcached. A good lesson in how scaling can be a specialized discipline all in itself.
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