cookbook: n. [from amateur electronics and radio] A book of small
code segments that the reader can use to do various magic things
in programs. One current example is the "PostScript Language
Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN
0-201-10179-3), also known as the Blue Book which has recipes for
things like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D
fonts. Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into voodoo
programming, but are useful for hackers trying to monkey up small
programs in unknown languages. This function is analogous to the
role of phrasebooks in human languages.
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