I\'m a junior in college majoring in Computer Science. Apart from writing lots o

Question

I'm a junior in college majoring in Computer Science. Apart from writing lots of code, I want to start reading source code written by others to improve my coding skills and learn better/different ways of doing stuff. I was thinking I should start reading some of the key parts of the code in C++ compilers. I think this would help me do two things:

Learn elegant coding practices because compilers are hard and the code represents solutions to this hard problem.
This would also help me learn about how my most used language is compiled, the details, how each error is generated, how code is parsed, and become really good with the specifications of the language.
Do you think this is a good idea?

Explanation / Answer

Hard to say from your post how much you already know about C++, but I wouldn't start by reading a compiler's code. I would spend time with good books first. A very short list:

Programming Pearls (Jon Bentley)
Code Complete (Steve McConnell)
Accelerated C++ (Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo)
Effective C++ (Scott Meyers)
Design Patterns (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides)

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