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Expert C Programming
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Author: Peter van der Linden
List Price: $42.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0131774298
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (14 June, 1994)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 52,011
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Excellent Book! Informative and fun
For those looking to dig deeper into the nuances of the C language, this is an excellent book! It has given me a better understanding of C that is helping me design better C code. A must have!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Interesting but not oustanding.
At first glance the book purports to be similar to other early Bell Labs books about C, specifically, "The C Programming Language", "The Elements of Programming Style", "The C Standard I/O Library", and (not bell labs but another great book) "C: A Reference Manual", etc. However, the author suffers from being a compiler-writer who doesn't really understand the design philosophy of the C language. This is the same afflication that Bjarne Stroustroup and other language designers suffer from. For example, he complains that only 3% of switch statements in his own compiler have case statement fall-throughs, therefore "We conclude that default fall-through on switches is a design defect in C." (p. 38). This is a rant of a dangerous person. Two underlying concepts of the C language are, "No hidden instructions generated where I cannot see them," and "When in doubt, provide open operators for maximum expressiveness - do not restrict expressiveness". Just because this particular compiler-writer lacks the inventiveness to do interesting things with a switch statement he proposes to force his biases upon the rest of the world. I have seen and written macro libraries that allow you to suspend & resume function calls, and these libraries perform fall-through 100% of the time. Therefore, this book is in error and the author is a victim of his own lack of creativity. Another thing I disliked was a tendency to try to impress the reader with irrelevant facts that are not germane to the subject, such as typos in the ANSI C standard or tired-out stories on how to burn out IBM PC displays. These things are irrelevant and do not belong within the book. I recommend you check out the book from a library (as I did) and please do not waste your money on this book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
very entertaining read!
is this a bestselling novel? this got to be one of the most entertaining technical book ever! heck, i bought it only to enjoy the humorous sections of the book. i like the funny stories at each section which greatly alleviates the "pain" of reading usual C programming books. the interview section is worth the price of the book. great technical writing demonstrated throughout the book. buy it!
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