Customer Reviews

Practical C Programming

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I own literally shelves full of C and C++ books, and I've been programming in C professionally for almost ten years. This is THE book to have on C. I insist that every junior programmer I work with has a copy! It addresses not only programming syntax but good software engineering practices, and it has the most realistic real-world types of problems I have ever seen. When he asks you to find the bug in a section of code, those are exactly the type of bugs I see in novice programmers' code again and again. C is not a language for people who need to be coddled, and this book doesn't hold your hand; it just gives you lots of great information on C and how to do good software engineering. If you are a serious C professional, you should own this book.

Reading other people's reviews for most of the O'Reilly series books, what most people are forgetting is that O'Reilly books are not for the faint hearted. These books are written by people who use these languages for a living. They teach people in the more advanced capabilities of the language and the proper ways to use it. In fact, several of the books are written by people who were developing the languages. Practical C Programming and all other books in the Nutshell series are for technicly enclined people, not for beginners to the area. These books have been ranked as the best of the best for a reason, their real. Any book that tells you your going to learn a language in 21 days is not going to teach you any details and turn you into a code copier, not a code programmer. But then again, that's MHO.

I bought this books because of the usefulness of other ORA I've bought. This one just wasn't as good. When the book contained the information I was looking for, it was presented well and very helpful (assuming I could find it). But I found the index to be incomplete making it difficult to find many topics, and many other common features which I would have found useful were left out all together. This is more or less adequate, especially for a beginning programmer, but I'm sure there's a better book out there.

I recently purchased the 8/01 printing of this book. I did so after a quick scan of the book. My decision was heavily based on the fact that it's publish by O'Reilly, a company I had come to trust for accuracy. The code examples in this book begin to make me question that trust.

Don't get me wrong, the author is very clear in conveying the given topics, and for that alone the book is worth purchasing. However, the book is riddled with errors in the example code. In some cases the errors are intentional and corrected later as part of the lesson. Many others have been reported to O'Reilly, but appear to have gone unchecked. The current errata page for this book is quite long and was last updated (8/15/01 as of this writing) during the same month as the printing I have. However, O'Reilly still has these glaring errors classified as unverified.

Overall the book has been a wonderful learning tool, but you must take the source with a hefty grain of salt, and make your first stop O'Reilly's errata page.

If you are at all familiar with O'Reilly computer books, you know that they typically put out a good product. This book is no exception. It is not a book for "dummies" or "idiots" in that it does not present the material in 5 sentence paragraphs and have zillions of useless pictures. In addition, it does not purport to teach you something as complex a C programming in an exorbitantly short period. What is DOES do, is teach you C Programming in a straight forward and through manner. The O'Reilly books -- and this one is no exception -- are no nonsense technical books. They get to the heart of the subject matter and deal with it. You don't have to be a computer guru; but you must posses some basic common sense and a willingness to learn a subject, and not just expect to be an expert by reading a book. Programming is learnt by doing, Period!. This book acts as your guide as you practice and learn this wonderful skill. All the source code in the book (i.e. the examples) can be downloaded from O'Reilly's web site. If you want to learn C, get this book.

(P.S. No, I do not have any vested interest or personal stake in O'Reilly Publishing... I am just tired of sub-standard books in the computer industry and applaud this company's quality work.)

This book does a reasonable job introducing basic C concepts. However, the topics are interspersed with the author's opinions on programming style and process. This makes looking up answers difficult. Furthermore, major language concepts are either glossed over briefly, or left out entirely (e.g. I can find no mention of function pointers). I bought this book expecting something like other O'Reilly titles (a concise and thorough language reference), but I ended up fairly disappointed. Finally, the author's attacks against Intel's x86 architecture, however accurate, are inappropriate for a guide to a programming language.

Undoubtedly the best C book I have ever read. Stresses readability of code over size. Demonstrates how to effectively Debug code, how to optimize code, and gives down to earth practical instruction on C programming. I would recomend this book to anyone wanting to learn C, or to anyone who knows C and wants to further their knowledge of good C programming theory.

The bottom line is that I used this book to learn C and I program a lot in C now. However, I felt the section on arrays was insufficient. The book reads pretty well, but then once you try to sit down and code, you realize that the wool was being pulled over your eyes, that the description wasn't adequate enough, especially with regards to arrays. Steve Oualline does not devote enough time to these and doesn't place enough emphasis on the various forms that a pointer (and it's value) can take on. The examples on recursion are also very ambiguous.

I haven't read any other books on learning C so I can't compare it with others, but in an absolute sense, I don't feel this book was all that great. This is my feeling nearly 2 years after having initially digested it for a class. I believe that there are some very important parts of ANSI C that were not discussed, like how to pass over a field with sscanf using the "%*_" instead of "%_". I think a better book would have saved me a lot of hours of debugging because it would have highlighted the areas that easy to make mistakes in,(for instance, counterintuitively having to use strcpy() instead of illegally reassigning a string once it's been intialized.)

Steve Oualline's Practical C Programming 3rd Edition, whether or not it provide the fairly well-written introduction to programming with C, certainly deserves up to three stars. The book starts from the discussion of good programming style. His suggestions on styles might be a subject to debate, however, are worth to listen as a one-time-reference for beginners who want to obtain readability to their source code. On the one hand, this book will give you the advantage of ease of reading through entire pages of the book, and, on the other hand, you will be able to avoid cumbersome work to search for well-written tutorials on the web consuming your precious time. Although the book is not the best, I emphasize this book is a fairly well-written one-time-reference. If you need more preciseness describing C programming language, this book is not the choice. If you are a very beginner who want to look at *loosely* overview of how to program in console mode with C programming language, this book is your choice.

I am torn as to give it 4 or 5 stars. I'd really like to give it 4 1/2 stars but I have 4 or 5 to choose from.

I don't know if it's just that I've read about pointers so many times and finally got it but this book seems to me to have the best explanation on them yet. I mean most books tell you about them but in trying to describe them they loose me on why I should use them. This book gave a quick explanation of what they are and then showed a practical example of how they are used. To me, this was very important.

This is also the first book I've read that really explained the preprocessor to me and now I finally understand that #include "whatever.h" really isn't c-code but rather preprocessor stuff. It contained very good explanations of this and macros.

While I don't know that I would recommend this to a beginner, it certainly helps the intermediate programmer (which I feel that I am) move up a little. It is also one of the first technical books that I really didn't want to put down and that I read like a novel. While I skipped over most of the exercises, as I felt I would go back to them, I felt a lot of the questions that are in the book are good examples of how to spot common errors. Mostly stupid programmer errors like forgetting to close a comment which I think helps make the book more "practical" like the title suggests.

If you write code for a living, this probably isn't the book for you. If you don't already know a programming language more complicated than BASIC or don't have some basic knowledge of C then this book is not for you. HOWEVER, if you've taken a class in c, read a book but didn't really feel like you've really understood c, this book is for you.