5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Enthusiasm's limits, November 18, 2010
This review is from: C For Engineers & Scientists, An Interpretive Approach with Companion CD (Paperback)
This book is terrible to teach or learn from.
Its most prominent sins are as follows:
Not ANSI compatible. He includes his own "Chde." This is fine in and of itself, but he expects you to be using it throughout the book. The problem with this is that his environment includes his own customized variables, functions etc. All of the examples are built using this framework. Some standard functions exhibit non-standard behaviour, a simple example is his printf function which has a binary (%b) format specifier.
Poor organization. At one point he has you write a program using strings before he has ever mentioned arrays.
Sloppy details. When explaining various sorting algorithms, we attempted to work through one of his sort functions as an example of a bubble sort. His was modified, with no mention as to the modification or its purpose.
To quote our Prof. "He's bastardized this too."
That was the day we stopped using this book, and switched to "The Joy of C."
Edit: deleted word "function"
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
comments about the book, December 19, 2010
This review is from: C For Engineers & Scientists, An Interpretive Approach with Companion CD (Paperback)
I found the book is very clear for learning C.
The topics are well organized and presented.
The multiple colors of the book make it very easily to read and follow.
The book covers C in great detail,
especially for difficult topics like pointers. It is easy to learn
C using the C/C++ interpreter without going through
editing/compiling/linking/debugging cycle in the beginning.
I really don't believe there is such a professor
who would ask students to switch the book in the middle of the class.
It is also hard to believe that a professor would make comments like
"bastardized" in front of students to attack a book author
he/she selected for the teaching.
Part I in the book has more than 700 pages.
The printf("%b") is the only non-C standard feature I found.
It is used to print data in binary format which works in C/C++ interpreter Ch,
a much complicated equivalent versions of C program
is presented in the book for comparison.
In my opinion, it isn't it is a big deal
as long as the book already points out that is is non-C standard feature.
In my opinion, this feautre is very useful
and should be a part of the new C standard in the future.
I visited author's personal website and noticed that the presented
bubble sort should actually be called the selection sort
as pointed out in the book's errata.
I read Professor Thomas M. Huber's book review published
in IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, July/August 2010 (vol. 12 no. 4).
Below is the abstract of the review.
"Textbooks on a topic such as C programming are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
In contrast, Harry Cheng's entry is an innovative textbook and programming
environment that defines a new interactive paradigm for learning and
using C and C++ that's particularly well suited for scientists and engineers."
It appears to me that the above abstract of the review summarizes the book
quite well.
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