Customer Reviews

C How to Program (5th Edition)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is one the best C textbooks out there on the market currently. I just use the C part of the text for my classes. As mentioned above most of the text is the same as the previous edition(s) except this edition has:
1. Game Programming
2. Eliminated the Java stuff
3. More on C99
Wish it was a strictly C book (no C++ sections in it)

Here's the punchline: despite the title, this is a book about C++ as much as it is about C; moreover, there's little to no original content in this book. It largely consists of chunks of text from other books by the same authors pasted together with some minor editing, but the editing was not extensive enough and the seams show: a few sections (straight from the middle of the book) talk about the garbage collector in Java as if it were a part of C!

I just finished a course on C, and the instructor opted to use this book. My first impression of the book was that it's way too expensive and it's way too big for a friendly introduction to C. From the size alone and the ten different subheadings, I had a feeling this was going to be a prime example of what I call Textbook Syndrome, and indeed it is now my main example of this phenomenon.

Textbook Syndrome is an unfortunate disease afflicting most authors who write books used for introductory freshman and sophomore college courses. In short, Textbook Syndrome causes an author to write for the people teaching from the book, not the people learning from it. It is believed that Textbook Syndrome is contagious and is spread via the propagation of poorly understood flimsy green entities; the development of a cure and preventative measure is an open question in science today.

For diagnostic purposes, here are a few common symptoms of Textbook Syndrome, all exhibited keenly by the present book:

(i) The book includes about ten times as much material as could reasonably be covered in a one-semester course. This is done so that (a) the book is bigger and therefore both looks more substantive and costs more; (b) it can be used for any course on any topic remotely related to the book's title; (c) it can be used for both introductory courses and advanced courses. The math is simple: (a) + (b) + (c) = a blatant attempt to maximize profit, nothing else.

For the student, it means he must carry around an ancient thousand-page tome, the majority of which will never be useful to him. For the teacher, it means he must (perhaps ironically) put more effort into actually providing the course with a coherent structure, as the book itself, so overburdened with unnecessary material, could never hope to achieve any sort of coherence.

This is a book on C, as the title suggests. It's also a book on game programming. It's also a book on C++ (count them: ten chapters). I wonder if they will add another ten chapters on Java in the next edition.

(ii) Exercises range from fill-in-the-blank questions about what preprocessor directive to use to include one file in another (I am not kidding) to a team-based, multi-month extravaganza to develop a compiler from scratch. Books written by authors having Textbook Syndrome often exhibit what I will call the intermediate value property: given two extremes possessed by the book, the book will also possess everything in between.

The present book indeed has the intermediate value property. Every imaginable exercise in between the two above extremes is present at the end of each chapter. Presumably this is so the book is useable at the same time by everybody on the planet Earth from Ph.D. physicists and mathematicians at NASA to novice junior high students who aren't up to speed on the concept of "computer." (For the latter group, worry not: the first chapter will help clarify the purpose of these auspicious contraptions.)

(iii) Very important pieces of information are inexplicably missing. The standard function gets() is mentioned, but it is not mentioned that this function should almost never be used. Even the man page for gets explicitly states it should not be used, but this thousand-page tome can't even provide this nugget of actually useful information.

(iv) The book includes vocabulary lists (just words, no definitions) at the end of every chapter since, you know, memorizing vocab words is useful while one learns to program. (Technically, this is a special case of the intermediate value property discussed in point (ii), but the vocab lists are so stupid I wanted to give them the emphasis that comes with having their own point.)

I could go on, but I will conclude this review with a description of who I think must be the quintessential intended user of this book. You should buy this book if you have money to blow, you believe that copying and pasting bits of text from a dozen other books is the height of authorship, you want to support the financial decline of many poor and starving computer science students who are forced to purchase books like this, you believe vocab lists are relevant to computer science (and therefore you have absolutely no computer science education whatsoever), you don't know the meaning of the word "focus", and you have long lost any respect for titles (who are these titles to dictate the contents of books anyway?).

I purchased the 5th edition of this book because I was very impressed with the 6th
edition of Deitel's "C++: How to program". I now regret that decision.

The two biggest flaws of this book are;
1)The lack of integration of the c99 standard into the text and examples. There is a (brief) chapter bolted on as kind of an after thought. Given that this standard had been out for at least 5 years since this edition was published it seems a bit lazy to not include more references to modern C earlier in the book.

2)The rather large focus on C++. 10 out of the 27 chapters deal with C++. If I had wanted a book on C++ I would have brought one, if fact, I did. This space could have been used on so many other useful things, like, how to produce larger C programs, or a non-windows IDE option for compiling.

On the plus side, there are plenty of chapter review questions, and exercises and pretty in-depth coverage of the c89 standard.

My advice is, if you want to know a bit about C as a stepping stone to C++, get the Deitel C++ book C++ How to Program (6th Edition) as it covers this information. If you want to do plenty of homework on C89, save yourself a lot of money and buy a second hand copy of an older edition.".C How to Program (3rd Edition) If you want to learn modern C and not C++, get another book.C Primer Plus (5th Edition)

This C programming book is very full of examples and is very well detailed. The authors break down the C language into every day terms we can all understand. The down side is the volume of information in each chapter. The book is very wordy and it's easy for a reader to get lost in the details. But the authors do make a very good attempt at explaining the C language. I recommend this book for the beginner programmer. It is definitely not casual reading material. This book is best read actively while sitting in front of a computer. Duplicating the author's example problems and trying the exercises at the end of the chapters is the best way to cement your knowledge.

This was a required text for a "C" programming language course I took at my University. This text is very clear about the basics of programming with the "C" language, which is a spring-board language that will allow you to quickly learn about other programming languages such as C+ and Java. I took this course over the summertime and had to miss the first two weeks of class while on a business trip and this textbook did an excellent job of teaching me the basics for me to succeed and receive an "A" in the course. I highly recommend this textbook as both a teaching text and a reference.

This book is really good. There are lots of examples with well explained code. Too bad there is no e-book to facilitate searching within the book (the book is over a thousand pages), although I don't blame them that much due to the facility in finding copyrighted ebooks that give nothing back to the author.
The CD could have had the binary code instead of having to go to site for that purpose.

Anyways the book takes you from beginner to intermediate in C language programming and gives you an intro to C++ and game programming using the allegro library. I'm very satisfied and still have a good way to finish the book.

This is the perfect solution to a beginner programmer, who knows nothing about programming to learn, practice and master the art of C programming. No previous programming knowledge is expected. It takes you through a vivid journey of the language from basics and covers literally everything including OOP and games programming.

The comprehensive exercises provided at the end of each chapter helps the learner practice what he has learnt and it also makes this text ideal for college courses.

The fact I liked mostly about the book is its highly descriptive nature. They have missed nothing. (They ought not! since the book has more than 1000 pages.)

This the best investment that I have made in a book. It is well organized and explained. The exercises through out the book and at the end of chapters helped me to understand the materials and other programming languages. I wish there was a solution manual for this text book. Each chapter has about 40 exercises. It is fantastic.

I did send an email to the publisher and questioned them on the solution manual. They relied to my email fast and offered help to solve them.

It is a must read book in C programing.

Frank Smiley

C was ever used today, lol. But if you need it for a class like me, get it. It's practically the same as the future editions.

For my C programming courses, this book is perfect. Everything is explained so that I understand it quickly, and there are lots of examples. I don't understand why some people dislike this book so much; I feel like it's a lifesaver and much easier to understand than my professor's class lectures!