Customer Reviews

Software Tools in Pascal

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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This book was reccomended to me by a freind. Initially, I was not thrilled. After all, I didnt know Pascal, and didn't care to learn Pascal. Pascal to me is a langauge only used by some academics and those stuck in the mainframe world.

I write in C, C++, Java, Perl. What relevance could Pascal have?

Boy was I wrong. It really isn't a book about Pascal, it's a book about writing good software. Pascal is immaterial to the reader. It is just a langauge that is being used to illustrate good software design.

I did most of the examples in Perl or C, and learned a good deal about good design and good coding.

The programs are a bit simple, but unlike other books the examples really build on each other and seem like useful programs. Unike the typical toy java program, that you see in books.

I would reccomend this to anyone who is starting out in programming and would like solid principles to start with.

i read this book and felt that i was born at the wrong time. this book not only teaches you how to program tools, but how to be a good programmer. the authors believe (and i also do) that with the right tools, the programming job is always easier.

a tool should be a simple independent program that accepts input and produces output, with no interaction from the user. the concept of redirection and piping (dear to unix and linux users) is recurrent in the text.

because we programmers spend most of our time dealing with text, the tools presented deal with textual input. the reader will learn how to write tools similar to grep, ed, sed, sort, compare, tar, just to name a few.

the text and the code--complete, by the way--are amazingly short. another evidence of the power of tools coupled together.

you won't do much with the code, because it's old pascal and people have already done the right thing. especially with the creation of unix and c.

don't despair if you already know a modern programming language and feel like you are wasting you time on things like module inclusion, string representation, or string handling functions. remember that old pascal did not have these things we now take for granted.

This book was recommended to me by one of my computer science teachers back in 1985 and I still use it! I have tried and tested all the programs in the book myself and I am still using some of them today.

I know these tools come standard with the Unix programming environment, but when I got the book I didn't have access to a Unix system. I needed these tools! (And occasionally I still need them, when working in a DOS-box or on OpenVMS.)

Apart from the practical use these programs have to me, I very much enjoy the writing style and the detailed explanations about which choices were made in the implementation and why these were the right choices.

Perhaps (along with the earlier version "Software Tools" using Fortran) THE GREATEST programming book ever written.

Just completely disregard that it is written with Pascal as the example language: this books teaches new or even intermediate programmers -- and experienced programmers who never learned this -- HOW TO THINK about programming.

Completely disregard that it preceded the Object Oriented revolution -- since if you cannot write GREAT FUNCTIONS and GREAT tools you cannot write great classes for objects.

Writing any great code is about writing tools. Tools to do something critical, or tools to build other tools until the program both does something useful to human beings, AND until the code has components that can be both re-used in other places and can be re-used for the NEXT version of that great program.

Anything that isn't written from great tools will eventually reach the point where it cannot be maintained or isn't useful without being re-written.

I program in something like 40 languages but I still re-read THIS BOOK at least once each year.

Buy it; breathe it.

First, the reviewer who was surprised to find this in Pascal, and not C,
was apparently unaware that the first version of this book[...] Was in C.
This book is a rewrite using Pascal. However, that is not the
only reason to skip this version for the C version. Software tools is
indeed a classic for its time, showing complete examples of serious
programs such as text editors and search programs for the first time,
when the book was published in the late 1970's.

However, at the time the book was published, Pascal was also the
predominant small computer language, and the authors translated the book
examples to Pascal and rewrote it for this version. That is fine.
however, the authors actively didn't like Pascal. Kernighan published
the article "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language".
Kernighan starts the book with "standard Pascal is far from an ideal
language", and the examples in the book are basically a demonstration
of how Pascal can be made to look like C if one adds unecessary
parenthesis around every expression, convert the I/O system to look
like C by adding a series of routines to replace the native Pascal ones,
and add heavy use of a front end macro processor. The result would be
better titled "writing software tools in languages we hate".

I am not a C basher, I use C in %70 of my work. However, this book is
a classic, in its original C language. It is certainly not a classic
in Pascal. Buy the C version.

Scott