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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must buy, January 15, 2005
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A fair book but NOT for beginners, May 5, 2009
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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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible textbook, November 22, 2008
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??
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