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Can anyone point to some good resources that teach how to code around data and not the other way round?



The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric Raymond, particularly chapter 9: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/generationchapt...


Switch to a language that emphasises functional programming (F#, Clojure, OCaml, etc) and it will happen naturally.


Surprisingly there is no one book AFAIK but techniques are spread across many books;

The first thing is to understand FSMs and State Transition Tables using a simple two-dimensional array. Implementing a FSM using a while/ifthenelse code vs. Transition table dispatch will really drive home the idea behind data-driven programming. There is a nice explanation in Expert C Programming: Deep C secrets.

SICP has a detailed chapter on data-driven programming.

An old text by Standish; Data Structure Techniques.

Also i remember seeing a lot of neat table based data-driven code in old Data Processing books using COBOL. Unfortunately i can't remember their names now. Just browse some of the old COBOL books in the library.




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