The Art of Writing Efficient Programs

Dates Read: 02/20/2026 - 03/02/2026

Rating: 4/5

I came across this book from Coding Jesus, and what I liked about it was that C++ emphasized and it made me stop my intutive nature to guess about performance optimizations rather than actually measuring and profiling my code.

That is a core lesson he teachers is that we must first measure and get baseline before we make any optimization because we can guess all day long, but until we get the measurements we won't know the true cost or effect of the optimizations we thought of.

The book is broken up into three sections:

• Performance Fundamentals
• Advanced Concurrency
• Desiging and Coding High-Perfromance Programs

Based on the the organization of the book, Pikus does well to pack all that content into one book.

It's almost full circle bringing forth the knowledge of "C++ Concurrency in Action," "Computer Organization and Design," and "OSTEP" to attempt understand the machine before we try to optimize the software we deploy on it.

It's a great edition to add this to your collection and arsenal if you program often with C++ and work on systems that demand peformance for large scale servers or even desktops.

For me however, it was bittersweat because oftentimes all these optimizations he mentioned were not very embedded related, so it felt hard to connect them to a target that was quite small and often did not have all the memory hierachies involved with a larger system.

Additionally, the examples are all in C++, but you could apply them to other languages, except you must find a tools that are applicable to your languages for measuring the perforamcne of your code.

Finally, your measure of performance depends on what you want to emasure, whether that is energy use of your code, the speed of execution, the memory consumption of your code, or the amount of I/O operations completed. That is also what I learned here, so whichever you mwant to optimize will dictate which techniques you should apply to optimize.