Customer Reviews

C & C++ Code Capsules: A Guide for Practitioners

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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
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After all of the wonderful reviews, I expected more from this book. The page layout was VERY difficult to work with, bouncing through source code, then reading about it, then having to flip the page to see the implementation file for the struct.

Three chapters are devoted to the C standard library, so if you are a traditional C coder, this will be familiar. However, if you are trying to learn practical C++, there are better books: Effective C++, More Effective C++, C++ Gems...

Many of his examples of `practical' code are written in C, with the C-style comments as the give away. The section on casting does not include any of the new standard safe casting operators, although they are included in the appendix. Several of the examples shown near the end of the book are many pages long, and if you want to use it, you get to type it in manually.

Also, although this may or may not affect your decision to purchase this book, I found the glossy pages VERY DIFFICULT to read under a halogen desk lamp.

If you are looking for a transition from C to C++, or want code samples for bitmasking (2 out of twenty chapters devoted to this), this book may be for you. However, if you want a great C++ book, look elsewhere.

When we served together on the C++ standards committee the highest compliment Chuck ever paid my proposals was to call them "practical", and it is my pleasure to return that compliment. This is one of the most truly practical books on C and C++ you could hope to own. Not just for the useful example code, and not just for the down-to-earth, easy-to-read text, but for Chuck's clear understanding of what it is a practitioner really needs to know, and his unique ability to get that knowledge across.

As a professional programmer I had forgotten why I enjoyed programming to begin with. Staying up late with friends fiddling with this or that language idiosyncrasy. Breaking application modules down to smaller and more representative code capsules to illustrate a language or compiler nuance. 'Code Capsules' is written in that easy, friendly style that makes you want to sit with your laptop and try out little code snippets in the compiler over a pizza. Chuck Allison's extensive knowledge and experience with C and C++ creates a comfortable writing style that will gently draw out more than a few "Ahhhh, so that's why ...". If you are learning C++, 'Code Capsules' will help you understand the language; if you are a professional programmer, 'Code Capsules' will make you a better one; and if you just enjoy programming languages, 'Code Capsules' is your best friend, now all you need is the pizza. Thank you, Chuck!

One of the hardest things about learning a programming language is discovering how to use it the natives do. This book allows programmers of all skill levels to improve their use of C++. As a long-time C programmer the C capsules were interesting and vindicated opinions I had held for a long time. The C++ capsules helped me to gain proficiency, helping me to feel like I am now an expert with C++.

My favorite use of this book is to help settle "style" discussions. Finding a code capsule that discusses why the position I'm supporting has some definite benefits makes it easier to get the point accross.

I put this book right on the shelf next to Scott Meyers' two books (Effective C++ & More Effective C++) and Jim Coplein's Advanced C++ as "read once a year".

I had a great start of 1998 when I acquired this newly published book at the beginning of the year. This book exceeds the expectation on which the title conveys and gears itself towards the practicing C++ professionals. Although the first six chapters talk about "preliminaries", experienced practitioners can also benefit vastly by revisiting the core fundamentals on which this book is based: "I have found too many developers ill-prepared to master C++ because they lack a thorough understanding of basic concepts such as pointers, scope ... and the biggest deficiency of all is a lack of familiarity with the standard C library." One of the best feature of this book is that it is packed with examples and interesting language manipulations while simultaneously alerting on common pitfalls, and reading the "code capsules" alone makes good revision and time investment, and surprisingly, it also provides new insights on our knowledge, or lackof. As this book constitutes the anthology of articles contributed by the author to a leading computer magazine over a period of time, the only downside of this book is the inconsistent declaration and definition of main() with and without the explicit return type and return value. Overall, this book is highly readable and is very interesting to read, and it encourages repeated readings that reinforce more and better understandings. This book is an indispensable tool for the current or aspiring practitioners.

I bought this book a few years ago upon recommendations, I was using C++ then. Now I need C rather than C++. I have only recently opened the book. I am afraid to say I am mostly disappointed. I think I would prefer to see a C++ Code Capsules book and a separate C Code Capsules book. I plan to sell my copy as I don't find it useful. Every time I need a useful bit of code I have failed to find it in this book; but other books have been useful.

I had high hopes for this book. Great author, great recommendations. Unfortunately I was dissapointed in his treatment of the subject matter. I think this book should have gotten rid of all pretense of discussing C, which I believe it does a bad job at.

Getting rid of the C code would have made many of the examples irrelevant and/or clearer. For example, Mr Allison tells C++ programmers that to include old Standard C headers you now have to prefix a c to the filename and remove the .h (<stdio.h> would become <cstdio>). This is great information, but confusing because in the next example he uses <stdio.h> again.

Something that was very annoying was the page layout. The examples and tables were all over the place. The text would often get cut up by several pages of code, which looks much like the text (similar font and size). The tables were also too far away from the discussion to be useful. I found I would just take his word on what he claimed and would skip the tables when I eventually found them. That is a great shame because that has nothing to do with his writing.

I waded through the bad page layout and what I consider to be inconsistent usage of C and C++ because on the whole the book provides up-to-date information (real Std C++), but I would not say that this is a book for practitioning programmers, more like for people who want to start using their C++ compilers for more than simply a C compiler.

For a more detailed review, please see my Devil's Advocate column in UNIX Reveiw/Performance Computing Feb'99

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making review of this book is a great experience for me looking in to the book we find the nachural way of getting in every thing is wonderfull