Customer Reviews

The Standard C Library

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

P.J. Plauger was operating at full-tilt when he wrote this excellent guide to the implementation and use of the C library. In particular, his treament (and history) of <stdio.h> is outstanding. Unfortunately, the Plauger of recent history is apparently being held captive by Microsoft. His "C/C++ User's Journal" is brimming with non-portable Windows topics of little value to those interested in Standard C and, of course, the Unix platform...where C began. Plauger has apparently forgotten the roots of the C programming language. Nonetheless, this is among the five "must have" books for the serious C programmer

First of all (also metioned by other reviewers), the layout of this book is horror. Everything is printed behind each other (not very much whitespace).

This book is a nice reference, but maybe you can better use Internet nowadays.

What make this book really nice, is that it offers implementations for the standard C library. So if you're looking for a implementation for sqrt/sin/tan/printf/etc. you will find it in this book. This is a really nice way to get some insight how an implementation of a Standard C Library could work.

This outstanding book integrates three treatments of the Standard C library: The straight text from the standard, a commentary, and a prototype implementation. All of these show Plauger at his best.

Even though the implementation does not always look elegant (and unfortunately is not open source), it provides a high quality implementation of each aspect of the standard and is extremely instructive (I found the stdio formatting code and the math routines particularly interesting).

When I bought this book, in college, I really didn't understand it. It didn't really give me much information, just had a bunch of code from the C standard libraries in it.

I picked it back up a few years after I started working in the real world and now had enough experience to realize what a gem this thing was. It basically implements (full source code) all the standard libraries. It let's you see how things work on the inside. It shows structs and accessible items that you may otherwise not even know it exists.

The best part is the source for standard library functions. This is a super handy gem if you are doing embedded code that doesn't have OS support. It was a wonderful help to me that let me write a few of the standard C functions that were handy to use when in an embedded environment where those functions weren't available. Many of these I could have done myself, but only with much though, time and testing. From here its virtually free.

This is a MUST HAVE book to any hard core C/C++ developer.

If you are looking for a reference to the standard library, this is it. There is a chapter for each header. Each chapter details all functions that are available and how to implement them. The book is about 500 pages, but all chapters are useful. You won't find any fluff in here.

Reference book for the C standard library which defines things like <signal.h>, <stdarg.h> etc. Every chapter deals with one C header file. It contains a lot of explanations, some extracts from the standard and examples. One cannot possibly program in C without this book.

The Standard C Library has been an industry reference for real-time operation since it was introduced. Through many versions (K&R, ANSI, etc.) and revisions it has remained THE go-to book when you need to know how a standard library function works. Recommended for anyone using C, C++, C# etc. when you want to know how it REALLY works... and will remain a classic.

The print is smudgy, and a lot of the real estate is devoted to reprinting the ANSI standard, but I would rather look up library calls in a book than the COMPUNET.

Also, I thought the comments on the design of the library were very interesting. A little historical perspective never hurt anybody!

People sometimes make jokes about people who call them self's real programmers (and vise versa). But this is a book that a real programmer will have on their bookshelf as reference material, along with their copy of "The C++ Programming Language" and others. I have not referred to this book in years, but I have never regretted the purchase. It is rare that someone who probably wrote the library that you are using writes a book on it. So even though it is very technical, it is a must have for anyone who wishes to meet the same standards as "The Standard".

Although the information in this book is crucial for C Programming, I was disappointed in the quality of the print. Some of the words are not even legible.