Every year I try to complete the Advent of Code. Every year I fail to finish. I get about halfway through, and the exercises start taking longer to complete than I have time.

Every year I think about Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls¹, because the same kinds of challenges you find in Advent of Code can be found in the book. The main difference being the quality of the answers. At least in my case². In the words of the preface: “Programming pearls whose origins lie beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity.”

The format of the book involves presenting a programming problem and then iterating on the solution while discussing the trade-offs involved at each step. It’s quite an old book by computing standards – the second edition was published in 1999 – and you may be put off by the use of C to illustrate the solutions. I would urge you to continue anyway, even if you are not an expert in C. You may also find some of the solutions to be hard work. Honestly, that’s part of the fun. If you don’t like having your brain turned inside out, this isn’t the book for you!

As you work your way through the chapters, you realise that the key for most of them is not esoteric optimisations or low-level hacking made possible by the C programming language. Instead, it’s data structures. If you somehow manage to store your data in the “correct” way, the algorithm to process it becomes simpler, clearer and faster. It’s almost miraculous.

Of course, there’s a lively debate about “computer science” and whether it should be the subject of developer interviews. What I would say is that the kinds of people who like to attempt Advent of Code are very likely the kind of people who will also enjoy Programming Pearls.