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C for professional programmers
Tizzard K., Halsted Press, New York, NY, 1986. Type: Book (9789780470207604)
Date Reviewed: Sep 1 1987

I hope that the title of this book will not turn away any potential readers who are not professional programmers. The title may not be the best description of the intended audience. I would not try here to define the meaning of “professional programmer,” but I expected a book with this title to cover the language in more depth and to address at least some of the topics this title raised in my mind: problems in writing portable programs, work on the standardization of the language, and style rules for teamwork. I expected a book that might teach an experienced C programmer additional techniques for using the tool with which he is already familiar.

The actual audience of this book is programmers, not necessarily professional, who have some experience in another programming language; this is correctly pointed out in the Preface. The book makes no attempt to introduce C to a reader without such experience. The author starts with examples of complete programs that contain only features that C shares with most programming languages. He then gradually reworks them in order to introduce the language features specific to C.

With the overview of the language given early in the Introduction, the other chapters can provide full treatment of their topics without having to avoid references to topics not yet introduced. The rest of the book also relies heavily on examples, both in the form of complete functions and short code fragments. Examples illustrate even some of the more esoteric points of C, like the equivalence of expressions

array[3] and 3[array]

I would have enjoyed the examples more if they were typeset with a fixed pitch typeface. There are too many places where it is not clear, without the context, whether the space between two quotes represents one blank, two blanks, or no character at all.

The preprocessor chapter provides not only sufficient coverage of all directives, but also good advice on why and how to use them. Library functions for input and output are discussed in detail. Other library functions are summarized. The only Appendix gives syntax diagrams of the language. The Index is good, although this is not a reference book. The book’s strength is in examples, particularly in frequent small examples illustrating the exposition.

Reviewer:  Alex Abacus Review #: CR111338
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