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Code Generation in Action
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Author: Jack Herrington
List Price: $44.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1930110979
Publisher: Manning Publications Company (01 July, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 23,234
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Ultimately Disappointing
There are things I like about this book, and the topic is certainly timely, but this falls down the same rabbit hole many books do: the examples are just paltry and do not add up to a book-length treatment. Little is done to convince the reader that the code generation option in each case was the best solution. For instance, in the case of SQL statements, there are countless other options. What makes this approach superior? One gets the feeling that the answer is the author just needed another example to paper his undertaking with. Some of the sections are downright preposterous in their brevity. There's a section on generating Swing dialog boxes. It contains almost nothing but a silly diagram that looks like a data flow. A good book on this subject would have used a real object oriented language to implement the generators, and would have showed the abundant design patterns that would apply to this problem (Builder, Bridge, etc.). One imagines that there could be many reuse opportunities in the generation framework. Code generation in some of the proto-MDA tools (like Eclipse's EMF, for instance) or the JET project show a lot more promise.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Great introductory material on code generation
The introduction and motivation are quite compelling, though a bit more detail on the dismissal of passive code generators (i.e. wizards) and focus on active code generators would be nice. The examples are also quite practical and seem high quality, though the use of Ruby is going to be a barrier to some.There was one guest-written chapter that might as well have been elided, or should at least have been more edited to integrate cleanly. It repeated a lot of what had been said earlier, and could've just jumped straight to the point instead. Finally, the code samples were a little repetitive in places. I would've preferred the book were shorter, with more info at the level between high-level and code (i.e. what does it make sense to paramaterize, and how should your generator work) rather than focusing either at the high level of 'architecture' or the low-level of 'how a single variable replacement works'. Still, an excellent book, and quite a good introduction for those who don't use code generators already.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Not very useful when the examples are written in RUBY!!
There's a lot of why and what but almost no "how" here, unless you want to learn a language called Ruby. He doesn't even give much in the way of Ruby code, either. It's mainly a lot of complicated program diagrams that look like an ad for Visio. If you want to read ABOUT code generation, buy it. If you want to see actual code generation, skip it.Sorry, I can't jump on this bandwagon.
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