Customer Reviews

Programming with Curses (Nutshell Handbooks)

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

 

 

This book was a waste. I purchase a 'programming' book to learn how to develop using a particular library, etc.
This is a pocket guide to curses with a 5 line piece of code every once in a while.

If it is new to you find something else.
I looked at a Wrox "Linux Programming" book and found MUCH more thorough explanations and covering the same material! I guess I'll use that instead.

OK on basic information, could use some more examples. My main goal was using color with SCO/Linux programs. Unfortunatly this book gives no hint that color is even possible, much less how to do it. This book must be 20 years old and doesn't appear to have been updated in all that time. HAY!!! There are color terminals now!!! And Curses supports them!!! Xterms can be in color too!!!
I found the doc files about "ncurses" that came with my "Slackware Linux" far more helpful than this book.
The book is probably OK for intro in a classroom setting to give students background, but I can't really recommend it. You can get more "useful" info from a "Yahoo" search or from linux "ncurses" documentation.
It can provide a quick reference for finding which curses function calls to use to do basic windowing and such.

This book is the only general resource I could find on curses programming. Since everyone wants to make forms on character interfaces, the best way to do it through the standard TTY drivers is with the curses library. The examples were enough to prove to me that it's not a plug-in method, but that one needs to adapt one's application to use the curses library from top to bottom. It will be better to write my program with curses in mind from the beginning than to try to retrofit a finished product.

While this book covers most of what you need to know, it would have been a great book if it gave the information in an orderly format. The only code is the spreadsheet (too simple) application at the end of the book. The documentation that came with sunos 4.1 is more comprehensive.

This book explained almost everything I needed to know.

Myonly complaint is that it lacked any mention of xterm and how to usecurses in an xterm window.

Otherwise I highly recommend it.

This book is almost the only reference for curses that I have found. It is lacking in explaining more complex uses and functions, but is enough to get you started...

This book is exellent in giving you the feeling of true curses programming with unix. This also allows you to add windows and color and ansi spiffy features to your programs.

An excellent manual on the proper use of curses in programming. My one problem with this book is the availability to young children. Anyone could walk into a store and buy this. We should protect our youth from the type of seedy and (admittedly) distasteful (albeit highly useful) information in this book. They should learn about curses on the streets first. Just like everyone else.