I don’t know if I will ever be done reading all these books, but I think they deserve to be on my geekshelf, which is already full of computer science and programming books…and the Harry Potter series

1. Algorithm Design Manual

How many of these algorithm books do I need before I clearly understand NP-complete problems?

2. Concurrency in Java

Something I really need. UC San Diego emphasized a lot in Java (and C). However, I took my operating system class with a professor who favored C. So.. I never had to deal with multithreading with Java craps. This books seems to cover a lot of details on how to do multithreading correctly in Java, plus the concept of multithreading.

3. Coders at Work

Interviews of many famous coders… this should be fun.

Anyway, if I’m graduating in few months, I need to figure out what I need to do upon my graduation.
I have updated my resume and submitted to a bunch of places.
I’m planning to submit it to another set of companies.

Hopefully, I will get through all the job application and interview process well…
*crossing my fingers*

        $file_name = "somefile.txt";
        open (my $fh, $file_name) or die "Ouch: $!\n";
        # $text variable now contains whatever the file contains
        $text = do {
            local $/ = undef;
            <$fh>;
        };
        close($fh) or die("Ugh: $!\n");

Just to compare, this is how you would do in Java:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;

public class ReadFile {
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        try {
            String filename = "somefile.txt";
            BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
            ArrayList lines = new ArrayList();
            String line = null;
            while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
                lines.add(line);
            }
            bufferedReader.close();
        }
        catch (IOException e) {
              System.err.println("OUCH!!!!");
        }
    }
}

After this, you get a list of string that contains contents of a file. This is a little extreme case, but still… it shows how much of work you would do if you want to do the same job in Java.

@decorator
def decorated_func():
... some code ...

Same as . . .

def decorated_func():
... some code ...

decorated_func = decorator(decorated
_func)

Basically, decorator is a function that can do anything before and after a decorated_func gets called. This is closely related to the decorator design pattern, which dynamically add functionality or responsibility to an existing object. With that said, you can add as many decorators as you can as long as their types are matched:

@decorator1
@decorator2
@decorator3
def decorated_func():
     ... some code ....

In the next two posts, I will go over how to create a decorator for general functions and classes. I will also go over some interesting ways of using decorators, such as the famous memoized decorator.