Customer Reviews

Programming Logic and Design, Comprehensive, Fourth Edition

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was delightfully surprised at the level of detail used in this book. As a working professional, student, and busy mom I have never taken the time to review an item on Amazon.com's website - and I have quite a substantial library of technical books acquired over the past 13 years, many items purchased through Amazon.com. However, I had to take a moment to review THIS BOOK.

As a self taught programmer, I found mastering the syntax of a language very simple. Naturally, I initially thought understanding the semantics of a language would be enough to succeed in it professionally. I worked in an IT department as an analyst and found coding in this home-grown system to be quite rewarding.

However, I found myself transitioning to another company after my department was relocated to a different state and quickly realized that understanding a language is not enough, as a specific language such as C, Perl, C++, or Java is simply a tool - to a programmer used to solve a given problem at hand.

I pursued formal education as ran across the second edition of this book a few years ago as the required text for a Logic/Design class. As a professional programmer, lifetime learner, and student who is passionate about the "art" of programming I can tell you the 3rd edition is a wonderful book (a complete revision of the 2nd edition with insight into OOP, which unlike many other logic/design books walks you through the analysis, design, and development of complete programs - including array manipulation, sequential file manipulation, data dictionary - METADATA design, advanced modularization techniques - as must have skill (ex. most of the report applications I work on are hundreds of lines of code, are composed of various modules, and include calls to mutiple external subroutines - so being able to understand the hierarchy, calling, and called modules of a large complex routine is important is creating, modifying, and/or maintaining it ), control breaks, menus, data validation, event driven programming, and system modeling) that will not only greatly improve your success as a programmer (student or professional), it will guide you on a path as both a logical and critical thinker - critical skills to succeed in life and programming!

Good luck on your "programming" travels. For me, this book was a great investment and money well spent.

This book is so well written. I didn't have any clue about computer programming logic until I read this. It is written so that even a person who has never seen a computer before could understand it. This is one textbook that actually helped me pass the class.

This book has a ton of unnecessary information in it, the assignments are not covered in the text, and moreover it is very hard to get help elsewhere because it covers neither pseudocode nor programming but somewhere in between. 800 pages of small print that could be 300. Half this book is what not to do??

This is a great book to learn programming structure. I learned more from this book than I have from other similar books. You won't learn syntax in this book, but there are lots of flowchart and pseudocode examples that illustrate the concepts. There are example problems at the end of each chapter as well as a video learning aid.

I've taught with this book using the 2nd edition, the 3rd edition, the 4th edition and now the 5th edition. Each edition was better than the previous with better explanations and bug and typo fixes. The only problem with the 4th edition was the printer used colored paper for much of the book making those pages harder to read.

The 5th edition is somewhat larger (number of pages) than the previous version. But, to me as an instructor, the new pages only confuse the students. It is as if the author simply wanted to add size to justify the new version. All in all my students find themselves more confused by what they are reading than previous classes with the 4th edition.

I recommend to the author to release the 6th edition quickly and rip out the additional verbage that was added.

I don't find this book easy to understand at all. I am taking this class as a requirement and think that the introductory book would have been more appropriate than the comprehensive. I think having an answer guide for this book would have been nice as you could have followed it to try to help you understand the material a little better. I find the illustrations of the don't do it problems confusing and see no need of them even being in the book. And the questions for the chapters to me want you to create programs that are not covered in the chapter. I for one don't like this book. For someone that has a little programming experience under their belt might not have a difficult time, but for a beginner there has to be a better book!!

The book would serve the student better if the psuedocode could be compiled and checked against a master key or even a basic solutions manual. I attend a college where when you pay tuition you are also paying for a tutoring type service related to that class which oddly enough my school does not actually offer, and my professor has been zero help in atleast converting my correct psuedocode into a flowchart. It would behoove Ms. Farrell to consider also attaching a solutions manual to the book like in most math or logic based college books.

This book and the lab companion was required for a online Programming Logic and Design class I took. I'm new to proramming and the only pre-requisite to the class was College Algebra so it seemed like a good way to get my feet wet and get exposed to programming.

PROS: It starts off very easy for beginners and accelerates to advanced so you get a well-rounded idea of Programming. I had no idea about the use of flowcharts and/or pseudocode as a kind of outline of the programming process you plan to use so found this part very enlightening but after awhile, the flowcharts got kind of old and wasted a lot of space.

CONS: You need to know JAVA or get a JAVA for Dummies book to supplement it. Why? Some of the exercises ask for coding that is not explained thoroughly in the book or the lab manual. I did well in the class until the last three chapters which were advanced. Array's and transferring multiple data to a linked file and retrieving it back were a little over my head and gave me headaches. That is where more code examples could have been helpful. I learn by seeing an example and changing it's parameters for the new situation. The exercises were asking for code that was never listed in the book or throughly explained. By this time, the author could have left out the flowcharts completely and focused more on code examples (you should be more than familiar with flowcharts and pseudocode by the ending chapters so why keep repeating them?).

Overall, the book was fair and convinced me that Programming is not for me. Some people in class were asking professional programming friends for help so that tells me the book was inadequate for them as well. Everything before Chapter 9 was good, it's the advanced parts that really needed more explanation for us beginners and is where the book fell short.

I've been a programmer/scripter for almost 13 years now and this is a required reading for one of my classes at school (I'm not taking the class, I bought the book to be able to test out of it).

Onto the book. It's easy to read. About 40% of the book is taken up by pages and pages of example code which could have left this 700 page book somewhere around 400.

Although the book shows a good deal of programming logic, it's not all-language friendly. The author repeats (Java, C++, C#) throughout each and every chapter as if those are the only languages out there. And if you are familiar with other languages, you'll know a good portion of what she says only relates to those three languages. If you know Perl, C, JavaScript, or MySQL the rules really do not apply and there are so many better ways of doing things than the author teaches. Because it could teach you logic you cannot take into a language, I strongly suggest you have SOME experience in any programming or scripting language before reading this book. Reading this book first could really make learning your first language more difficult.

Onto the worst part.. the impossibly many flowcharts. The author teaches you the basic symbols of creating a flowchart to plot your programming ideas down. There's nothing wrong with that, flowcharts can be useful. But the problem is the author assumes everyone plots flowcharts the same way. In my decade+ of programming experience, I've NEVER used these symbols to illustrate decision making or loops. And neither have any of my coworkers or other programming students from class. It's just unheard of as if the author is trying to get everyone to follow her way of making the flowchart. My biggest issue with the book was the way the author kept using her flowcharts for every example in the book. You'd think after a while she could just write the psuedo code to save on space and extra reading.

It had some interesting points, it's not an all-bad book. But it's more for someone who already has a grasp of the concepts. I would not recommend this book for students.

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Computer programing is a rabidly growing career field, and will be for some time to come. So if you want to learn how to program, I recommend that you start here and develop a SOLID foundation for what ever language you wish to learn.

This book will make learning any and all other languages much simpler and will even help to open your repertoire to many programing languages and applications.