Customer Reviews

Essential Open Source Toolset

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I used this book twice as a text for a summer class reading class for students in an executive MS program at UT Austin. There were 9 students the first summer, 7 the second summer.

I really liked the concept of the book, and the set of topics is very good - the only topic I didn't like was the material on slicing & the only topics I felt were missing were shell scripts and logging.

This the the first edition of the book, and some of the shortcomings I'm pointing out below stem from the fact that it's a first edition, hopefully the authors will have a second edition that takes care of these issues.

1.) Some of the chapters could do with more written and programming problems.

2.) Source the assignments is not available online (and the versions I got from the authors was buggy, e.g., for testing the primes program).

3.) The emphasis on C should be reduced, maybe even removed completely. All the C oriented tools - lex, yacc, doxygen, etc., have counterparts in Java now. I would also remove tcl, replace it with a more mainstream scripting language (i.e., Perl).

4.) The material on code tuning and IDEs could also be more detailed.