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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
C programmer should always have a copy of this book., November 27, 2000
I am a computer user without any great school diploma but who like to learn how things work inside. I have the gnu/linux system on my computer for few years now and I am using it almost every day.Believe me, you need this book. If you have minimum knowledge of C programing, it will explain the printf function in detail. If you need more than this, take a look in the part about sockets and tcp/ip. This is called "Reference Manual" but it's more than a simple alphabetical list of all the function. Each subjects have a chapter that begin with a few paragraph to introduct the subject and they put examples where necessary. (No need to open your computer to see them like in others books I have seen) Another good point is the way you can find a page in the book. - There is a Table of content ;-) - A concept index(where you can find something like "Comparison Function" or "creating a socket") - A Type Index(with all the data types used by the library), - A "Function and Macro Index" (Where are they talking about the printf thing?) - A "Variable and Constant Macro Index" (What is errno?) - And something cool. An appendix they call "Summary of Library Facilities" it's contain all the functions (and macro, var, ..) with: the header file you need to include, the system it come from (is it a POSIX function? SunOs specific?) and the page number. Since you can install GCC and glibc on almost any unix like computer (And widows with cygwin). By the way they explan the installation process in the book. And since the book talk also a litle about the native library of others system. Well. Read it. When I began to learn C in linux, I was using the 'info' command or the FSF web site to read the book . (Because it's also available online!) But I should have buy a printed copy long ago. This book have 1079 pages. And lets say that a coder use only the half (that he would read a couple of time for reference). That's insane! Don't lose all this time on the computer. Read it in you bead or whatever but not on the screen. In fact the indexes are soo well done that it's almost fast that any kind of hyper link. If you want to check the online version: http://www.fsf.org/manual/glibc-2.0.6/libc.html I almost forget. They also spend few pages in the printed copy for things like contributors and the full text of the LGPL. You may not want to pay for this but it is somehow in the spirit of open source software. Isn't it? The only reason I put 4 stars rather than 5 is that this book is for Version 1.09 Beta while the publisher, FSF, are printing the one for version 2.2 (Edition 0.09 DRAFT but not that draft at all).
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