Customer Reviews

Jamsa's C/C++ Programmer's Bible

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book presents numerous stand-alone topics and code samples that are grouped together in more or less logical chunks: Basic C language stuff, strings, functions, keyboard handling, files, directories, and disk operations, arrays, pointers, structures, DOS/BIOS, memory stuff, date/time. The book also contains a bunch of C++ topics such as the obligatory object/class and inheritance material, templates, exceptions, STL, windows programming topics, and some useful material on processes and threads.

The book is not designed to be read through for a comprehensive understanding of any of the logical areas. Hence it is not suitable as a beginner's book. Rather it is designed for the programmer who is familiar, but not entirely proficient with C and just wants to know how to accomplish some very focused task: "gee, what's one way to spawn a process?"

I program in C a fair amount, but am not a guru at it by any means, and so I have found this book to be very useful as a resource when I wanted to do something new. I hate wading through all the nonsense you get with most C references which are slanted towards beginners and not toward those of us who have to do something real, and really quick. Most of those books contain the same information and none of them ever seem to have just that piece of information you happen to need.

In searching for a C++ reference I wanted three things: a well written, easy to read book; a thorough index section; and a comprehensive examination of the language. This book provides all of those things.

I haven't had the chance to check all the code samples included within the book so I cannot confirm or deny of the validity of the complaints registered by other users. However, to those who deride this book because its disorganized and hard to read cover to cover: Its a REFERENCE BOOK. You aren't supposed to read it cover to cover. Any disorganization of material is more than made up for with the books excellent index (the best one I've seen in a reference book).

I looked at MANY C++ references in Barnes & Noble. Since they're ALL so expensive, I wanted to be sure that I chose the right one. For my needs, this was the best choice by far.

One of the details sorely missing from the book title is "for DOS and MS Windows programming." I found this fact frustrating, as I'm not a MS Windows programmer. Some of the examples are general enough to lead me to the correct man page, but not enough.

The book's organization and style of writing is surprisingly horrible. Just about every "tip" has the phrase "as you learned" and refers to another tip. Removing all the yous, yours, "as you have learned"s, and "In tip #, you learned that"s would probably cut the book length by a quarter. Reorganization of the tips into a more coherent order would help, too.

I have 8 programming books and have read them all, but until I read this book, I didn't feel like I had a good grasp of the C and C++languages. The problem other books are unorganized, poorly written, and to often, just plain wrong. This book has none of those problems. Very few of the examples had errors, you can't expect perfection from a book so large. The few errors I found were simple to correct (extra parenthesis for example). After reading this book everythign "clicked" and I no longer spend hours lookign for solutions in my other books, because after learning from this book I am now able to develop my own solutions. This book is also so well organized that when I do occasionally have to look up something I can find a solution in seconds. I would highly recommend this book for anyone from begginer to advanced.

This book, one of many written on C and C++ gives a summary of the structure and syntax of these two languages, and gives an introduction to the Standard Template Library and Windows programming. It is best used as a reference and not as a textbook, since there are no exercises or coding problems in the book. Some of it is out-dated, particularly the section on Windows programming, and an overview of that topic is best done with a book on the latest version of Visual C++. The authors do attempt to be comprehensive, and treat most of the main features of C and C++, but some important topics, such as performance issues with C++ versus C, are not discussed. It is a suitable reference for those who have considerable expertise in these two languages.

The first 800 paragraphs cover the C programming language, and the authors do a pretty good job of summarizing the main properties of the language. Some of the strong points in the discussion include: type modifiers, compiler pragmas, preprocessor condition testing, the functions atof, atoi, and atoll, formal versus actual parameters, function overhead, call by value and (pointer) reference, recursion, calling assembly language functions, the va_arg, va_start, and va_end macros, tradeoff between arrays and dynamic memory, quick sort, pointer arithmetic, DOS and BIOS services, memory management, memory models, the tzset function, the MAKE utility, linked lists, child processes, interrupts, invariant code, inlining, fast function calls, and code compaction. The authors give a large amount of sample code to illustrate these concepts.

The next 450 paragraphs give an overview of the C++ programming language, emphasizing it as an extension of C, and not as an independent object-oriented language. There are very effective discussions on: anonymous unions, the global resolution operator, lazy evaluation (this was particularly helpful), the 3 different ways to pass parameters in C++, the inline keyword, operator overloading, the scope resolution operator, when to use inline and out-of-line functions, friend classes, constructor functions, overloading with friend functions, multiple inheritance, mutual friend classes, inline assembly language statements in method functions (particularly useful discussion), the THIS pointer, implementing polymorphism, generic functions, exception handling, namespaces, the doubly linked list class, containers, iterators, and the vector class (very well written!).

I will omit reviewing the last part of the book on Windows programming since it is out of date and is treated more effectively elsewhere.

As a beginning C/C++ programmer I find this book to be very helpful. It is not a book that will teach you C/C++ programming but rather provide you with informative concise examples of how to complete a particular task and provide a quick refresher for those times when your mind goes blank.

I use this book often in conjunction with other texts that do teach C programming because I have found it easy to find the examples I need and like the straight forward explanations and code samples.

This book get's a permanent place on my desk top.

Here is my recommendation. If do not know how to program in C/C++ and want to learn how, I would not recommend this book as it's layout suggests. It is more of a reference manual than a beginners guide. I am sure there are plenty of beginning books out there that are easier to digest

To be honest I already knew C/C++ before I got this book and I haven't read it chronologically at all. I initially purchased this book because it looked like a decent quick and dirty C/C++ reference guide. Don't understand how 'printf' can take multiple parameters? And you want to implement something similar in one of your own functions? This book has got it. Admittedly it won't have everything and I was looking for just a straight C reference not C++ or Win32 programming (have other books for that). But I found so far it has fit my needs as a C reference nearly perfectly in that respect. The only thing I wish it had was some information on network programming.

The C programming in some sections seems to be geared towards DOS platform and not general ANSI C. Be aware of this. As most of that kind of stuff is outdated unless you still use DOS. I haven't done DOS programming in ages but so far with what I have read he tries to adhere to ANSI compliance on the majority of topics.

I am suprised that this didn't receive 5 stars overall. I own about 30 programming books and this one is my main REFERENCE, while I trust Herbert Schildt's book's for complete learning. You can get answers FAST. The book is loaded with useful ADVANCED TECHNIQUES, but is NOT INTENDED FOR BEGINNERS. Unlike most books, it answers the questions what, how, why, etc. For that reason, it deserves 5 stars.

This book is not designed to teach you the language and I think the examples (errors and all) are more to give you a visual of the text then to be used and compiled. If you are a programmer then this is an extremely valuable resource collection (noone can remember what everything does all the time).

In addition to being poorly written, having many errors in both the book and on the CD, it was also very over priced. I think that the author tried to cover too much info in 1 book, squeezing C , C++ and C++ for Windows, making it about 15 lbs, 2 inches wider and taller then your average book. It also seemed very un-organized, and would make a awful book for beginners.