I didn’t enjoy Write Great Code (Volume II: Thinking Low-Level, Writing High-Level), by Randall Hyde, as much as I enjoyed Volume I. The material was mostly either stuff that I already knew, or more detail than I needed to know, or even things that I thought were incorrect.

Understanding the concepts presented in the book is useful for writing code that won’t be needlessly slow. However, the author spends hardly any time reminding the user that the sorts of optimizations that he’s talking about should only be considered when you have a performance problem, and after you’ve profiled your application and established that the area of code in question is the reason for that performance problem.

I probably should have paid more attention as he talked about the specifics of 80x86 assembly, but it just didn’t draw me in, and it is still rather rare that I find myself staring at assembly code for any reason.

All in all, the book is definitely a “low-level” kind of a book, and thus is less useful to a “high-level” programmer of one of the more modern languages. I can’t really evaluate the book from the perspective of someone who has never done any “low-level” programming (I cut my teeth on C, after all) – this book may be one of the few places where “low-level” information can be found at all these days.