10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A book that should never have been published (should rate as minus 5 stars), 25 Oct 2005
By Francis W. Glassborow - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: C and Data Structures (Charles River Media Computer Engineering (Paperback)) (Paperback)
I am profoundly disturbed by the poor quality of this book. Here is an example to show why I feel that way. The example was chosen almost at random but even I was shocked when I came to type it in. I would not accept such code from a first year student.
On page 139 the author provides the following code (I have taken great care to copy the code exactly as it is in the book):
Struct address \\ A
{
plot char [30], struc char[30];
city char[30]
}
struct student \\ B
{
name char[30];
marks float;
struct address adr;
}
main ( )
{
struct student student1; \\D
struct student class[20]; \\E
class[1].marks = 70; // F
I have stopped at this point as it continues with a hard coded initialisation of class[1] followed by five printf() statements to output the contents of class[1] to stdout. Nowhere do the authors expalin why they want an array, why they ignore the first element of the array and why the bothered with defining student1. In addition the use of 'class' as a name introduces a gratuitous incompatibility with C++.
There then follows a section explaining the code. The first item is:
1. Statement A declares the address of a structure containing the members plot, street and city.
That code is so bad that I can think of no explanation for how a book on C could be distributed with such code in it.
I am disturbed by the number of positive reviews this book has had from readers because no one who actually tried the code provided by the authors could have got it working and the explanations are often bizarre.
Were it possible I would give this book minus 5 stars because learning from it would seriously impede a reader's development as a programmer.
There are numerous better books on both Data Structures and C. Indeed almost any book on either subject would be better.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Numerous Errors, 25 May 2004
By Chris Brown - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: C and Data Structures (Charles River Media Computer Engineering (Paperback)) (Paperback)
I would have to disagree with the other reviews of this text. I found this book full of gramatical errors, typos, and errors in the source code. The concepts presented in the text are exelent and the authors do a fine job of presenting these ideas. It is unfortunate that the editing was not better and that some of the source code seemingly was not compiled and tested prior to being included in the book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Full of errors and novice style of programming, 16 Jan 2005
By Mk "jgd" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: C and Data Structures (Charles River Media Computer Engineering (Paperback)) (Paperback)
Stay away unless you are desperate to lay hands on any data structures book. It has so many errors. Poor editing can confuse you. The code is written in often very beginner's style while no thought is given to Whys and Why Nots of an approach. Definitely not a good reference. Use and throw perhaps.
The program outputs are needlessly printed without any sensible explaination for most of them.