C Traps and Pitfalls (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

C Traps and Pitfalls teaches how the peculiarities of the C language make it easy for the intended behavior of a program and the actual behavior of a program to differ. The book's experienced author, Koenig, follows up with examples and helpful advice on many of these "pitfalls." Each chapter includes exercises for contemplation with accompanying discussions at the end of the book.

Product Description

Even C experts come across problems that require days ofdebugging to fix. This book helps to prevent such problems byshowing how C programmers get themselves into trouble. Each ofthe book's many examples has trapped a professional programmer. In addition to its examples, C Traps and Pitfalls offers adviceon: *avoiding off-by-one errors *understanding and constructing function declarations *understanding the subtle relationship between pointers andarrays Distilled from the author's experience over a decade ofprogramming in C, this book is an ideal resource for anyone,novice or expert, who has ever written a C program. 0201179288B04062001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (January 11, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201179288
• ISBN-13: 978-0201179286
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #580,046 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You must read this book., December 27, 1999

By	From_Plano_TX "a_customer_from_plano" (Plano, TX USA) - See all my reviews

If you program in C or C++, you must read this book if you want to consider yourself a superior programmer. If you are a college student, definitely read this book. Koenig fills in a lot of gaps left by authors of introductory books on C or C++. Why do I mention C++? Because C++ is far more than just objects and classes. The lower level implementation of functions is still basically C programming. He includes chapters on linkage, the preprocessor, and portability. It is a short book that is definitely worth reading.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enormously entertaining and exceedingly helpful!, May 13, 1997

By A Customer

This is among the five "must have" books on the astute C programmer's bookshelf. Actually, it spends little time on the shelf since one refers to it time and time again. This slim volume packs a lot of information about those "gotchas" that still "getcha" (when you least expect it). The Introduction is "Chapter 0", your first hint that Koenig knows and respects the subject. His treatment of unscrambling complex declarations is especially good.

Why a 9 instead of a 10? Simple. Andy: please release a new version! The ANSI/ISO standard is almost ten years old. :)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Know What You're Doing, December 4, 2006

By	T. Harris "http://talkaboutquality.wordpress.com" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you have to write in C, then yes, it is still worth reading a good, short book about C even if it was written in 1989. It can get a bit boring to read the details of selected problems and solutions in C cover-to-cover, but it's only 100 pages. An experienced C programmer will probably know many of these answers, and can skim over what's not new. But if you hit even one pitfall which is new to you, or which you have not made the effort to avoid, then the book was worth it. The bonus is the last chapter, "Advice". It's only a few pages, and is followed by answers to exercises. But I think it has more meaning if you do leave it until the end of your reading.

(One caveat: Since Koenig was writing before long variable names were common, his examples do not serve as best practice for modern variable-naming in an IDE with auto-complete.)