The Practice of Programming (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) (Paperback)

by Brian W. Kernighan (Author), Rob Pike (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Coauthored by Brian Kernighan, one of the pioneers of the C programming language, The Practice of Programming is a manual of good programming style that will help any C/C++ or Java developer create faster, more maintainable code.

Early sections look at some of the pitfalls of C/C++, with numerous real-world excerpts of confusing or incorrect code. The authors offer many tips and solutions, including a guide for variable names and commenting styles. Next, they cover algorithms, such as binary and quick sorting. Here, the authors show how to take advantage of the built-in functions in standard C/C++. When it comes to data structures, such as arrays, linked lists, and trees, the authors compare the options available to C, C++, Java, and even Perl developers with a random-text-generation program (using a sophisticated Markov chain algorithm) written for each language.

Subsequent sections cover debugging tips (including how to isolate errors with debugging statements) and testing strategies (both white-box and black-box testing) for verifying the correctness of code. Final sections offer tips on creating more portable C/C++ code, with the last chapter suggesting that programmers can take advantage of interpreters (and regular expressions) to gain better control over their code. A handy appendix summarizes the dozens of tips offered throughout the book.

With its commonsense expertise and range of examples drawn from C, C++, and Java, The Practice of Programming is an excellent resource for improving the style and performance of your code base. --Richard Dragan

Review
"The book fills a critical need by providing insight into pragmatic designand coding issues so that programmers become better at their craft...Programmers just out of school should be given this book on their first day of work. It will save employers thousands of dollars due to lost productivity and "mindless" debugging." -- Paul McNamee, Computer Scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

"The examples are just about right. Chapter 3's example (markov) is stellar; it is simple, thought-provoking, elegant, and most importantly, provides an opportunity to analyze good design... It is the most concise book of its kind and offers the most useful, no-nonsense treatment of how to program from authors who know a great deal about the topic." -- Peter Memishian, Member of Technical Staff, Sun Microsystems

"There is a tendency for many books to be in the high hundreds of pages long these days with very little justification. This text is well-written, and is not overly interdependent, thus allowing the reader to "skip around" as interests motivate.... I found [the examples] to be interesting. I like it when I don't have to spend time figuring out an example and I can concentrate on the lesson the example is trying to teach. Too many books have overly-complex examples, and this one doesn't." -- Chris Cleeland, Technical Lead, IONA Technologies, Inc.

"A great candidate to fill this widely perceived lack in the literature... Very solid and very educational, this manual is one I highly recommend to all programmers." -- Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books

"An outstanding book... a readable and well-written style combined with their experience and valuable expertise." -- Sys Admin

"This book is full of good common sense. In addition it is written in highly readable English. Pick up a copy, choose any chapter and start reading. I think you will then feel motivated to buy yourself a copy... Whatever language you program in, I think you will benefit from reading this book." -- Association of C & C++ Users

Rating 9/10: "Practical and enjoyable, this book captures its authors' considerable wisdom and experience." -- Slashdot.org

Read the full review for this book.

To be honest, there are quite a few books around that teach algorithms and the fundamentals of computer programming. The problem is that those books are commonly designed to support academic classes in computer science, and consequently shine on the theoretical side but leave something to be desired on the pragmatic front.

The Practice of Programming is a great candidate to fill this widely perceived lack in the literature that I commonly refer to as "for the industry." Authored by two experienced researchers of the Computing Science Research Center at the well-known Bell Labs (the name Brian Kernighan will ring a bell to the millions of C programmers), this manageable text conveys a fantastic quantity of suggestions and guidelines that will come in useful to all the neophytes of programming, and at the same time provides some sound tips and principles to the more seasoned among us. The first chapter approaches the delicate topic of good coding style; while the opinions on this are always subjective, those expressed by the authors seem generally acceptable and worth following. --Davide Marcato, Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books -- Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (February 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 020161586X
• ISBN-13: 978-0201615869
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #31,913 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No waste of time here, January 7, 2000

By	Charles Ashbacher "([e-mail])" (Marion, Iowa United States([e-mail])) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

In computing, the learning curve is doubly steep. Not only do we have to learn very complex operations, but we have to learn them at a pace unrivaled in any other field. Furthermore, the equipment improves at a rate that simply boggles the mind. In this frantic environment, we rarely have time to read our code twice, much less read a book about code. Therefore, when we do read, we must make every minute count. This is one book where your count of wasted minutes would be a very small one.
Some of the tips in this book are obvious in retrospect, yet ones that you probably would not think of. My favorite is the fact that due to the changes in processors, a double precision floating point arithmetic operation can be faster than the equivalent one for integers. In the "old" days, the gospel was that you must avoid floating point operations unless absolutely necessary, to avoid the degradation of performance.
Other tips, such as methods to assure you comment what is necessary, taking a few minutes to learn simple performance features, debugging and testing guidelines; portability issues and basic algorithm analysis should cause you to pause for a moment. Even in our hectic development environments, stopping and analyzing your code is a necessity.
It is difficult to conceive of someone who will not find a tip in here that will justify the cost of the book. Unless of course, you are one of the authors. I listed it as one of the top books of the year in my On Books column that appeared in the September, 1999 issue of _Journal of Object-Oriented Programming_.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book of its kind, March 1, 1999

By	[e-mail] (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews

I've long recommended Pike's "Notes on Programming in C" on my web page. This book includes most of the content from that essay and much more, but is still thin and concise.

What I like most about this book is that they justify all of their recommendations, show both good and bad examples, and keep the discussion grounded in actual code (rather than abstract principles).

Other things I liked:

- begins with a discussion of programming style and aesthetics

- they critique some of the designs that they have been involved in, such as C's stdio and string handling libraries

- they discuss the unique design issues presented by library design

- they give examples in C, C++ and Java, and give an honest appraisal of the tradeoffs involved in each language.

- FINALLY, excellent single chapter descriptions of systematic approaches to debugging and testing!

- they face up to some of the tough design choices that must be made outside the UNIX Ivory Tower (rare for these authors). For example, they sacrifice UNIX consistency in one application so that the application will behave consistently across UNIX and Windows.

Minor gripes:

- still skirts around tough design issues in error recovery and reporting; they advocate the "print a diagnostic and exit" approach (which is totally inappropriate for library code), and don't discuss the tradeoffs

- a few of the principles they cover will be trivial or obvious for experienced programmers

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple and excellent, January 18, 2001

By	Bryan O'Sullivan (CA, United States) - See all my reviews

I am bemused by the disparaging comments of my fellow readers in regard to this book. Kernighan and Pike make clear their intent in the first paragraph of the preface to this book; it is about simplicity, clarity, and generality.

To be sure, there is tinder here for short tempers and delicate egos. If you're under the gun, trying to duct-tape together the fifth release of some huge, unwieldy application, this book does not contain the short-term quick fixes you've been hoping for. If you're righteously convinced of your own sound practices and don't care to look at someone else's methods, this book may irk you.

Kernighan and Pike have written a book about the most basic habits and outlook that a programmer should have. They have not tried to address all facets of programming. Instead, they sacrifice scope to make their points stand out all the more clearly.

Would this be a better book if they had cast their net wider? Hardly. If you start off by applying the carefully thought out, methodical approaches described clearly throughout this book, your code will still hit abstruse bumps and strange circumstances. But most problems will succumb to the same analytical ways of thinking and tools that Kernighan and Pike have laboured to describe with such clarity.

But don't imagine that I think this book is perfect; the authors have been doing many things in the same ways for a long time. Most often, this is because their methods are effective, but sometimes they are far too close to being cop-outs. For example, the idea that it's OK to just print an error message and bomb out if something goes wrong is laughable outside of the Unix command line environment, and is rarely appropriate even there.

Fundamentally, though, if you can't solve the problems at the ends of the chapters (they're easy), or you think you can't possibly benefit from reading a book that troubles to describe quicksort (which you probably learned in CS-201), then there is likely nothing for you here. At least until you think to question your perspectives. Until then, I'll confess to a sense of relief that I don't have to work with you :-)