Customer Reviews

C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Clearly written and well organized, this book presents more than 20 _highly_ useful library interfaces for containers, string management, mathematics, and memory management. There isn't a line of code in the whole book that you couldn't take and use, verbatim, in a project today --- after reading this book, you'll probably never have a compelling reason to write a string library or a hash table interface again.

More importantly, though, each example library illustrates ways to effectively design consistant and useable library interfaces, from generic ADTs to system service wrappers. After reading this book, you'll not only have an arsenal of useful code to leverage, but also a good understanding of how to design clean, modular, reuseable components for your application.

Hanson's C code is extremely clear and concise. Even if you've been programming professionally for a long time, you are likely to pick up a useful technique or two just by reading the source code in the book. If you're not very experienced, you will learn about C programming idioms that will be valuable to you in future work.

I really like how this book, and Hanson's other book ("A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation") are put together. Hanson employs Literate Programming techniques to weave the code he's discussing together with his discussion. This makes it very simple to track what portions of the code are being talked about at any point

in the book.

If you want to become a professional programmer overnight.read and thoroughly understand this book. If one could master the techniques described in this book..he may never have to worry about failing software developer's job interviews. This last statement is based on my personal experience.
The chapters provide source code which is clear, efficient, and outrightly professional, the description is concise, to the point and clear enough.Most of the code in the book can be used without any modification. I don't know of a book in the market that could teach how to design and implement a user-level threads library from the scratch WITHOUT any help from the Operating System. Simply wonderful

I have been a C and C++ programmer for 5 years, and is regarded as an professional C and C++ programmer. After scanning this book, I think I should re-estimate my C skill.

In one word, this book is the most advanced C book I've read, it presents lots of wonderful techniques and ideas, and more, all the things are very useful. For examples:

* Use standard C's setjmp/longjmp to implement WIn32 SEH-like exception handling machanism.

* Very detailed and smart memory management solution.

* All the data structures and utilities in well-defined, reusable format: atoms, tables, sets, vectors(dynamic arrays), rings, strings, arithmetric with any precisions, thread library... everything you need to build a whole new system.

I'd say that once you master each of those things (this means read and re-read until understanding occur, as Fransis Glassborow said ), you will be an outstanding programmer in any circumstance, and can be full of confidence to accept any programming challenge.

The only thing I complain is about the source code. The source code presenting style in this book is relative strange and difficult to catch. I tried to type the code into my PC, and found it's a unpleasent work. Fortunately, the all source can be download from the book's web page, so, I still gave 5 stars.

I second the many positive reviews about this book. If you architect and/or make software for a living, this book will give you a life long of useful ideas and provide with real running and working generic solutions. Foremost I was personally stunned by the implementation of the exception handler emulator, which I adopted ever since. Now I can look back at it's respectable 12 years of service with exemplary low "bug rate" and hundreds of millions in revenue gathered from products using this style of coding.

One issue was not mentioned by the most of other reviewers: This book is one of the now rare examples of "Literate Programming," a term coined by Donald Knuth, who implemented the "web system" with two programs Tangle and Weave. From the same source the one program generates code for a compiler, the other generates a book text for a text processing system. This way code and the literature about it are in perfect sync. Most importantly, the code showed in the book is a real tested and running implementation, not a mere pseudo code used by others so often, which may or may not be correct. See section 1.1 for a description of the system and typographical convention used by Prof. Hanson in his book.

For me this book is a classic. Timeless, even now 12 years since its date of release it is highly recommended for every practitioner at any level.

A very good book also for the embedded field; you can't use much of the code in small 8bit microcontroller environments, but if you work with bigger 16/32bit microcontrollers many of the abstract data types (ADTs) described here can be useful. Maybe the "threads" interface can even be used as a base to develop a tiny cooperative embedded OS, too.

The title of the book is not exactly true: this is not a generic text on "C interfaces an implementation", it's a complete and detailed documentation of a well-projected C user level generic library, implementing a lot of ADTs that are not available in the C standard library but are available in many other high(er?) level languages.

You may like or not the semantic details and coding style, probably depending on your background: unix/linux programmers may not like it, as they may not like the ADTs prefix-verbosity...
It's a way to add modularity to a not-object-oriented language as C is; the same for the "typedef struct T *T" (opaque pointers) in headers: modularity and encapsulation.

Pseudocode notation (literate programming) is clear, as long as you read chapter 1.

I had been working with Java for 10 years until I realized I was bored out of my mind. I decided to build my next big thing in C. I wasn't sure anymore how to sanely build a large application without the code organizing properties and safety of an OO lang and I refuse to use C++ so I was stuck until reading this.

Easy to understand and apply. Will help you to understand the basic and advanced data structures used in every day coding and applications written in C.

I used it to get a deeper understanding of all those Microsoft interview questions, and to provide succinct solutions in coding using pointer arithmetic.

I purchased this book through Amazon on October 16 2006 11:05 PDT. I finally killed the order this morning because they still can't seem to get it in stock.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great book with many good examples. However, if you want it this century, go check your local computer bookstore because most online retailers are out of stock (including Addison-Wesley themselves).

I borrowed this book from the company library and now proudly own a copy of my own. Designing large modules of C code isn't a very easy task and the author does a commendable job at instilling a strong sense of OO design in C Code. This book stands at the top of my heap of programming/design books and I would consider it a must read for anyone serious about learning C and Software Design. Yes, do work through an introductory text on C before you get to this. And then dive into the fun ...

This book is very specific and has some pretty advanced examples. It was required for a course I took.

I enjoyed the course thoroughly, and we used the interfaces from Hanson (the author) extensively.
However, most of the information you need is in his source headers and online. The book is a decent supplement, but I don't think I used it more than twice.

If you need it for a course using the interfaces, use what he provides online and save the money. If you're interested in reading more on advanced C interfaces or teaching yourself without a class/assignments, then this is a great book.