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Title: The Practice of Programming by Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike ISBN: 0-201-61586-X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 04 February, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (40 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great book for intermediate programmers/hackers
Comment: This book is basically all the "common sense" stuff that you learn after programming for years and years.. most proffessional programmers already know this stuff--or should! This is a perfect book for a college graduate who is good, but needs some pointers in the real world, or for those who just want to freshen up their skills, etc. Beware though, this book is not "Programming for Dummies" you must already be well familiar with C/C++ and some algorithms and data structures to fully understand what the author is trying to convey, at times. But even if you don't, it's still a great book... it is (or will be) one of those classics like The C Programming Language, which every programmer has on their bookshelf. Pretty much any book written by Kernighan or published by A-W (Professional series) is a worthwhile read...
In a nutshell, as they say in the book: this is what most people should have learned in college, but couldn't or didn't. Get it if only to read the first chapter on style... I for one hate rewriting or reading people's code who didn't know how to write it well/clear, or comment it well.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best book of its kind
Comment: I've long recommended Pike's "Notes on Programming in C" on my web page. This book includes most of the content from that essay and much more, but is still thin and concise.
What I like most about this book is that they justify all of their recommendations, show both good and bad examples, and keep the discussion grounded in actual code (rather than abstract principles).
Other things I liked:
- begins with a discussion of programming style and aesthetics
- they critique some of the designs that they have been involved in, such as C's stdio and string handling libraries
- they discuss the unique design issues presented by library design
- they give examples in C, C++ and Java, and give an honest appraisal of the tradeoffs involved in each language.
- FINALLY, excellent single chapter descriptions of systematic approaches to debugging and testing!
- they face up to some of the tough design choices that must be made outside the UNIX Ivory Tower (rare for these authors). For example, they sacrifice UNIX consistency in one application so that the application will behave consistently across UNIX and Windows.
Minor gripes:
- still skirts around tough design issues in error recovery and reporting; they advocate the "print a diagnostic and exit" approach (which is totally inappropriate for library code), and don't discuss the tradeoffs
- a few of the principles they cover will be trivial or obvious for experienced programmers
Rating: 5
Summary: Experience distilled into a book
Comment: This book is perfect, it's not really for beginners, but more for someone crossing over to an intermediate level of programming, and wishes to learn some golden rules to keep in mind while programming.
The book is written in an incredibly simple and straight-forward way, which makes everything incredibly simple to grasp, and memorable. I know more than a handful of UNIX programmers that all either keep this book on their desktop for reference, or read it at least once a year.
This is the book I'd recommend to anyone who wants to "program better", this book probably won't teach you any new techniques, but it will teach you how to make your code more solid, more readable, and more enjoyable to maintain/debug.
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Title: Programming Pearls (2nd Edition) by Jon Louis Bentley, Jon Bentley ISBN: 0201657880 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 27 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Code Complete by Steve McConnell ISBN: 1556154844 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 14 May, 1993 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike ISBN: 013937681X Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Dennis M. Ritchie ISBN: 0131103628 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: 22 March, 1988 List Price(USD): $42.00 |
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Title: The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas ISBN: 020161622X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 20 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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