Customer Reviews

GCC: The Complete Reference

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author is knowledgable enough that one would assume he single-handedly developed GCC. Any doubts to his authoritativeness were quickly dismissed as I finished the introduction in this behemoth of a reference.

The Book is divided Into 3 parts(4 actually).

The first part delves into the reasons as to why? and what? regarding the creation/use of GCC. It also covers some incentives to continue through the book, which are later examined in detail. Installation, configuration, and usage is covered here. And covered quite well!

The second part details the mechanics of the compiler with tests and examples that take you through the workings of it. Mixing of different languages into one native-executable, experiments and understanding of the compiler's built in extensions/pragmas, and demystification of the command-line switches are all covered in this section. Also this section covers this in great detail as with the first part!

The third part of this book gets right into the fun stuff of learning how to properly set up configuration and make files. It covers a *great* deal of extra resources commonly found on systems with GCC installed and makes haste to demystify these as well. This was my favorite part of the book. I had no idea in the nine hells to even begin creation of 'configure' scripts manually(try reading the man/info pages for make and autoconf and watch your hairs get pulled out by your hands!). This section is concise and to the point!

Part 4 is an extremely important part of the book. This part covers ALL of the command-line switches and directives for use with GCC(and it's family of compilers). You learn where, when, and how to use the advanced functionality. A section in this part also covers all the environmental variables; this helps greatly when you are trying to figure out a perfect function/class/struct/call to do a procedure that ends up taking months...then you see here that a single variable contains actual data/info already!

All in all, this book is concise. I love it. It currently sits next to my Stroustrup(C++ Programming Language), Josuttis(C++ Standard Library), and Sedgewick(Algorithms in C++ 1-5). This book is upstanding. The only reason as to why I gave it 4/5 stars is because of the formatting. It reminds me of something you would find in a Prima Tech "Game Programming" book: large font, bulky, and divided. This is not the authors fault though since this same tasteless formatting is used in all other Osborne "Complete Reference" books.

NOTE: Do NOT get this book to learn C or C++. This book is for the intermediate to advanced programmer wanting to better optimize their usage of the GCC package.

This is a useful book for those who need in-depth information on GCC, but needs more effort in both writing and editing. There are numerous copy-paste-itis errors, which shows that it was not properly proof-read. It also has passages in various chapters which are nearly duplicates of each other, e.g., two "Multiple Source Files to Executable" passages (pages 70 & 106), and five on "Creating a Shared Library" (73, 110, 132, 144, 165). Admittedly some of the details vary from language to language, but there's no explanation of what these differences are; the passages are merely repeated with minor changes.

There are larger but similar problems with the organization of the book. For example, I would have greatly preferred a logically-organized listing of command-line options to a merely alphabetical order. A reader who wants an alphabetical organization can already get it from the manual. This arrangement also leads to problems with the exposition, e.g., the definition of -MQ assumes the definition of -MT, which it precedes. There are other problems with the order of exposition; for example, there's a two and a half page sample of RTL code on 367-9, which is incomprehensible before the explanation of RTL on pp. 387-417, and badly in need of more detailed exposition even afterwards.

(2/27/09: The author never responded to my list of errata, so I've posted it at http://pobox.com/~flash/errata/GCC_The_Complete_Reference_Errata.html)

This product is typical for GNU-related documentation. The book is relatively complete (at least with respect to its date of publication). As with other GNU tools, most of the information is available on-line and being 'open software'--expect continual changes, additions, etc. If you are one who still likes the feel of a book (e.g., Samuel T. Cogley), who likes to annotate the margins and underline--well this book is just the thing if you plan to use the GNU compiler.

When you are new to a platform you want to get a book that explains the big picture on how things work in this platform; you also want to get enough information on how to get started, not just the easy stuff that you can figure out yourself. This is that book for the GNU platform. If you are already a GCC guru, you probably will find little new here, but if you come from another compiler this book will give you a great introduction with enough information so you can start working right away and be productive from the first day.

Recommended for Unix programming (Linux, too) students and serious programmer wannabes.