Customer Reviews

Learn to Tango with D

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

 

 

The first English-language book on D, Learn To Tango with D, is a no-crap quick ramp-up guide to the language and the popular Tango general-purpose library. Half of the 188 pages are an introduction to how D does things, while the other half walks through some Tango basics. It's written in a fast, loose idiom that doesn't try to teach you programming as much as it shows how to do your favorite C++ or Java tricks in D. This fills a need since the existing D documentation is rather technical and not well indexed, but it's not something the dedicated and curious engineer couldn't figure out for himself.

After the basics, you're introduced to Tango. I should point out that D ships with a standard library called Phobos and that Tango is a (friendly) competitor to it. The two aren't mutually compatible at all, and you'll run into D code that uses each, so don't think you're getting the entire D story from this book. That said, Tango has neat ideas and a passionate community behind it, so you're not making any compromise on quality by using it. This section is a bit too high-level for my taste; it's an introduction, not a reference. While you can certainly get production-quality API docs from the Tango web site, don't expect the book to be one.

Summing up, this book is for experienced C/C++/Java programmers who've heard about this D thing and want to see what it's all about. Those who prefer learning from source code or documentation won't really need this, and those who do need it will probably find no need to read it a second time. However, as the only book on D in the King's English, it's worth recommending solely on that basis.

(Review text copied from my website.)

I found that this book strikes a very comfortable balance between adequately introducing the essential details of various important aspects of the D language and this version of a necessary "standard library". Given how recent the introduction of the D programming language is, and the relatively small size of its dedicated community, it should not be surprising that there are few published works defining the language and some of its optimal coding signatures.

This book's goal is to teach the use of the Tango standard library for the D programming language. It is not meant as a comprehensive teaching guide to D itself! Within this limitation, it does succeed, admirably. Contrary to another reviewer's scathing criticism; I found that, while terse, the descriptions and examples set forth in this book are clear, hew closely to the point at hand, maintain elegance in their simplicity, and reveal only necessary aspects of complexity in context.

To lambaste this generally excellent book for a personal disappointment regarding its scope, is inappropriate; and in any event, it obviously deserves well more than a mere one star. To that reviewer I respond: you are petty and have done the D language community a disservice in your churlishness.

The book is clearly inadequate. It doesn't even have an Index. It's describing a language and library which is superior to C++ and yet has less pages than "The C Programming Language" by Kernigan & Richie. It's describing D version 1 but D version 2 is out with more syntax changes. On the other hand it was the only book available and it does fill in some of the considerable gaps of the "D" description on the Digital Mars website.

A short and sweet introduction to the D programming language, with the majority of the syntax covered. Some concise examples and of course, Tango documentation.

There was a fairly negative review and I feel I should try and explain some of the (perceived) issues with the book.

Firstly, the length. While this book clocks in at just under 200 pages, and that seems relatively short. Especially when the book is meant to cover the entirety of a programming language, there are a few things we should consider. This book does not teach you how to program, it assumes prior programming knowledge. Furthermore, As D is a new language, there is no official standardization, and the official language documentation is often short, with very specific details left out. Let us also not forget than K&R is just about 250 pages!

The last few chapters of the book cover some of the Tango API. The Tango project is a community designed and maintained standard library replacement for D. It implements its own run-time and API set. Fixes a lot of the perceived bugs in the original, and no one can argue is a lot more robust than Phobos.

Tango and D are both constantly moving targets, and I believe this book does a good job of documenting the core of each.

In case you've found this title casually and are wondering, what's D, D is a relatively new programming language. It can be summarized as "the language to end C++"--I'm not implying it will succeed. There are lots of good things I could say about it.

With that out of the way, this book here provides a good, quick overview of the most elementary features of D, as well as few very basic ones of the Tango standard library (not the only standard library for D, by the way).

This has been compared with The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie; and they may be comparable books about different languages at this stage, specially since there's no competing book about D currently (May 2010; soon there will be, see below). But this work is--and it's important that you get this, before you decide whether to buy the book--good at teaching you to do in D what you already know how to do in other languages, but not at introducing you to programming concepts if you don't know them already (objects, templates...).

Moreover its coverage is very limited, there's much more to D missing from this basic overview than what's covered. It discusses only the skeleton of D. It's supposed to get you interested in D, but to continue learning you'll have to go somewhere like the official specification itself. Not to mention that D is still undergoing major development, and back when this book was published version 2.0 was even more of a moving and early target.

There's another book by some A. Alexandrescu, not causally titled The D Programming Language, that will reportedly be published in a matter of days and can be already pre-ordered at Amazon. It will probably be much more in-depth and get closer to the K&R paradigm. But again this one here may be what you're looking for, depending on your profile.

However, unless you're a somewhat experienced programmer, who wants to go as far as buying a book to learn about D, but at the same time is not interested beyond the basics, you may find this one lacking.

It really wasn't a very good book. It is very thin without the more complete examples you would expect in a book on development in other languages. It would be nice to see a book written teaching D from the ground up. Love the language, but the book is not worth the price.