Book Review: C O D E - Charles Petzold - chapter 1

I generally don't read things from Microsoft press simply because I don't believe that the methods and ideas about programming that they hold is a good way to program. So I was a bit hesitant to buy this book at barnes and noble. I was expecting a really technical book that would be hard to follow unless you held a computer science degree or something which misrepresented ideas and would illicit my criticism.... instead I opened up to page one and the entire chapter was about me as a 10 year old and my best friend who lives across the street. I thought this was quite odd for a book that was about programming but I realized that there was a method to this madness. This chapter laid the groundwork for the problem of communication and how messages must be simply and portably coded in order to transmit them with primitive equipment.... in the case of your ten-year-old-self: FLASHLIGHTS!!!!!!!!! He continues then by examining the problems with this method of communication. How do you communicate a message quickly, efficently, and understandibly? you start by drawing letters in the air with it but your friend can't quite understand because the letters you're writing are backwards, and there's no way to seperate the strokes of one letter from the strokes of another. Then you remember how on tv sailor's communicate by blinking lights and you start by doing a numeric code... A=1, B=2, C=3.... only to find to your complete dismay that just the simple phrase "how are you?" would require 131 blinks of light... next he discusses morse code and the whole concept of how a code is a method of communication... but he does something really cool with this, he then applies the concept of codes as communication to language (a personal favorite topic of mine) and illustrates how language is a type of code. Each word in our language is a symbol which represents a concept or idea. and how we construct thoughts from these symbols is a code that shows how these symbols relate to one another, but in reality, the vocabulary and the grammar are quite arbitrary... there's no reason why we should associate "cat" with those furry four legged creatures that require litter boxes and meow all the time. There's no reason why we should call these things cats except that everyone else calls them cats. Next the book looks in depth at morse code and how it works and makes sense. He shows that the code is essentially reduced to a set of two possibilities... dot... and dash..... I was hooked. I kept reading the book for pleasure more than learning and after only a few chapters said to myself "I wish I had this book when I was 12!". I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes codes and secrets (National Treasure fans who are into computers will find this a delightful read!) and the book is just an overall well written book.