5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent book for those wishing to move on in C, 16 Sep 2000
This review is from: C Unleashed (Paperback)
Fed up with books on C that tread over the same ground and then give up just when everything begins to get interesting? C Unleashed is written for the programmer who has a reasonable grasp (about a years' experience or so) of the basics of the language, including pointers, and wants to know how and where to go from there. Written by a collection of the resident guru's from the comp.lang.c newsgroup the book falls between a straight tutorial and an exhaustive investigation into a particular subject. It is not exhaustive, to be so would require a whole series of similarly sized tomes. As it is the book weighs over 2Kgs!
The book starts off by trying to break some of the bad habits and gotchas that learner programmers fall into: void main(); fflush(stdin); etc, though one or two common ones didn't make it in this section at least. This leaves you feeling smug as you tick off those habits you didn't fall into until..... I'm not saying which one(s). The Holy wars of programming style are covered though sensibly the book does not take sides.
It then inducts you into the usage of dealing with that most important part of programming: data, more specifically data structures. Again each chapter here could fill an equivalently sized book on its own so by necessity the information presented is simply that which you need to know to implement the routines.
Finally the third section introduces the programmer to a wide variety of current and potential uses of C in modern computing. From matrices to CGI programming to genetic programming there is something here of interest to most programmers.
What I don't like about this latter part of the book is that there is little sense of cohesion. It feels more like a collection of (practical) abstract conference papers. With each chapter by a different author and intended to standalone there is little code reuse. Thus code developed in the earlier part of the book is ignored for another solution. As an instance of this; chapter 6 develops various functions for reading and writing data files but parts of this are then rewritten several times again. Perhaps a distribution of the code developed in the second part of the book would have paid dividends in demonstrating the power of code reuse. The spread of authors also means that there is a variety of writing styles here. As ever a style that appeals to one person will not appeal to the next. It does keep things fresh though.
Recommendable? Yes! There are mistakes; it would be hard for a book of this size not to have any, though fortunately most are typographic rather than technical. There is a list of errata on the web. This book should sit on your bookshelf next to Kernighan &Ritchie, Harbison and Steele, and Steve Summits' FAQ book. Just don't drop it on your foot!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fantastic book for the practical use of C, 6 Nov 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: C Unleashed (Paperback)
If you've learned C, and you want to put that knowledge to good use in real world applications, then this book has no match. Topics covering a huge range of subjects from parsing text to digital signal processing. I wish I had found this book earlier.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Exceptional Book, 6 Sep 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: C Unleashed (Paperback)
This is an absolutely exceptional book that provides the reader with a understanding in a vast number of areas of advanced C programming. Each chapter can be read as a single entity and thus ensures that the reader can just pick out a chapter of interest without having to read the preceeding chapters. This book is a must for any intermediate C programmer who is looking to improve their C programming skills quickly to an advanced level.
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