(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.