5 comments about Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Rules for C and C++ Programming (Unix/C).

1. I'm a 11-year mostly C programmer and I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK. I've been a consultant for 5 years - and fixed a lot of code. Beginner programmers should read this and follow it. Computer Science and MIS degrees focus on algorithm design and efficiency and theoretical programming. THIS IS NOT THEORETICAL - this is PRACTICAL. Please, people, write code that's easy to read for the idiot that will come after you; over 50% of the cost of a progam is MAINTENANCE and if you write a simple routine that takes twice as long to execute, OH Well, unless it's a visible delay, no one cares about efficiency.

   Use this book as a CORPORATE STYLE GUIDE FOR C & C++ PROGRAMMING. If you follow it and write easy-to-read programs, your employer will SAVE MONEY IN MAINTENANCE. I literally agreed with everything in this book - with one exception. He poo-poos working over 8 hours/day. I disagree. True, programming is creative work and you can burn out, but I find 10 or 12 hour days highly productive because people don't interrupt me, and I try to task switch enough to give myself breaks (or stare out the window blankly to do some subconcious-problem-solving).

   In Short - Buy This Book, or borrow it - and save your employers money by creating simpler programs. You'll look like a star by creating something even a junior programmer can modify easily. If you're an expert C or C++ programmer, it's very worth it, too - you get another perspective on ease-of-use. I changed my mind and now will consider using const (I had only used #defines to simplify things - he made a good argument that the compiler is better than the preprocessor at catching brainfarts).

   Also, If you can, give it to your manager. They need to know this stuff, too.




2. Imagine someone took the Ten Commandments and tossed in some of his own commandments, and published it; of course, it would have some GREAT parts, but it would lend authority to the author's additions which they don't deserve.

   Yes, he includes the venerable rules of programming style, as laid out by the classic authors, then tosses in some of his own that are self-indulgent and provincial. Good luck to a beginner trying to sort them out.

   Pulling rules out of thin air makes you an autocrat, not an authority. Get The Practice of Programming, Code Complete.




3. Allen Holub's book should be on every C/C++ programmer's shelf.
   He is a master of his craft and one of the few writers in the
   field that is not afraid of being critical of the latest and
   greatest fad. His experience comes from years of work in the
   trenches and it shows. Ignore his guidelines at your own risk.
   You may not agree with everything he writes (I didn't) but it's
   all food for thought.



4. I read this book before I read "C Programming FAQs". While "Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" does a good job of pointing out trobule areas in C, the FAQ book does a much better job of point out more general problems because its content is taken from a newsgroup where real people as real questions.
   
   The advantage to this book is that C++ issues are also discussed, which make it a good resource.



5. I almost passed on this book because of some of the negative reviews.
   
   Okay, it is no Code Complete, but this book is an absolute gem. I have been programming C++ for about 6 years now (VB users be darned, it is my favorite programming language, period) and I was amazed how much I agreed with this author's advice.
   
   Yeah, I learned a lot from Scott Meyers' canonical "Effective" books. But what I like about this book is that it is a no-nonsense, in-your-face, tell-it-like-it-is book that I think is essential for those wet-behind-the-ears C++ programmers (or those whiners who claim that C++ is too hard).
   
   It will probably piss off a lot of Windows programmers as well as he is somewhat anti-Microsoft. However, I am primarily a MFC programmer and
   what he says about MFC (earlier editions) and Windows programming in general is absolutely correct.
   
   This book is a must for every novice C/C++ programmer. The experienced C/C++ programmers will probably tell you that they know all about this, so most of them will give it a pass. However, as a experienced C++ programmer, I think that they are making a mistake. They need to get this book on the shelf as well.
   
   At the very least they can loan it to the beginners.

4 comments about Palm OS Network Programming: Writing Connected Applications for the Palm.

1. Palm OS Network Programming is the first book for which I have written a review. I cannot think of a finer book to start my editorial review career. Greg Winton's organization, clarity, and writing style, transforms a potentially dry topic into a work of art that is truly a joy to read.

   I am currently 3/4 of the way through the book and I'm torn between plowing through it (as I usually do) and reading as slowly as I can...not wanting to reach the finish line.

   Greg Winton does an outstanding job of describing the principles behind Palm OS networking, and explaining network application development in crystal clear detail. The order in which the material is presented and the explanations that accompany the API descriptions and sample code, confess that this was not a book that was rushed to market, but was instead thoroughly researched and revised to perfection.

   I truly believe that Palm OS Network Programming raises the bar for future programming books, and deserves an easily accessible spot in every Palm OS developer's library.




2. I found this book to be exactly what I was in search of - something to clearly explain how to use NetLib along with well documented examples! Greg Winton does an excellent job of taking the reader through the development of an FTP application (explaining NetLib and sockets along the way) - each chapter builds on the previous and introduces new concepts in comprehensible portions.

   I admit, like most engineers, that I jumped ahead to the end to see the "whole enchilada", but then went back and reread the earlier chapters. This was still a good approach for absorbing all that is presented in this book.

   I highly recommend this book to anyone venturing into networking their Palm. It is well written, concise, and contains insights from someone who is clearly experienced in networking.




3. This is THE Book to have if you intend to do any type of network programming on the palm. The time you'll save in the first hour will pay for the book.

   Not only is it very well written it includes many great examples, covering the simple to the complex. Even if I'm only doing something relatively simple I've found it's always worth it to see how the author's handled the situation in his examples. There's also a lot of information here that's only briefly touched on in the Palm OS Reference or not covered at all.

   I'm very careful about purchasing books, usually relying on reference manuals and online docs when I can. However, this is one that I have absolutely no regrets about adding to my library.

   Kevin




4. An excellent, well-written book with great examples that should work for both beginners and advanced users. No other book on Palm OS development [I think I own just about all of them] overlaps in any serious way with the topics treated so thoroughly in this book.

   The chapters on non-blocking sockets are an absolute must-read for anybody who wants to develop robust, responsive, real-world applications for the Palm OS.

   Two nit-picky items: 1) the book is somewhat more verbose than it needs to be because of irrelevancies about "the Zen of this..." and the "Tao of that...". If you ignore these altogether too-cute sidebars, you'll have a generally more productive and pleasant read. 2) there are some occasional stylistic problems with the C-code. Not errors, but things like assignments to local variables that would never be referenced that show up. The code is also somewhat more pedestrian than that employed by most working C or C++ coders. For the large audience, this might be a plus. I think the style makes it more accessible to VB and NS-Basic types. But it will be a little off-putting to the hard-core.

No comments about Advanced Operating Systems.

5 comments about Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard.

1. Unicode Demystified is a great manual and a good read. It earns a place on the bookshelf of programmers who deal with modern text processing, which is based on the Unicode standard. It is a great resource for anyone involved in software internationalization and localization.

   Gillam provides a lot of useful details, history and explanations for the structure of the character set, and shows how to use it. The book is a companion to the print and online resources of the Unicode standard itself, and provides the glue to many of the pieces, the how-to's and basic data structures.

   For example, the Unicode encodings UTF-8/16/32 (and BOM) are explained very well, bidirectional text is discussed with a lot of insight, and the family of Indic scripts with their special features is presented with examples for how to encode Indic text.




2. I find this book extremely useful!

   This is almost three books in one. The first part provides a very good introduction to Unicode in general. The middle is really useful for all sorts of people, from linguists to content authors who want to understand the scripts encompassed by Unicode. And the last part is extremely helpful for programmers who want to understand how to implement many text processing techniques using Unicode.

   Throughout, Rich's style is easy and enjoyable to read, and yet quickly gets to a wealth of useful information.

   Great job! Highly recommended.




3. The book has three main parts:

   (1) Unicode in essence: an architectural overview of the Unicode standard (six chapters) where you also get bits of terminology and history.

   (2) Unicode in depth: A guided tour of the character repertoire (six chapters) where you get a lot about writing systems that can be represented in Unicode, and less about the Unicode characters.

   (3) Unicode in action: implementing and using the Unicode standard (five chapters) where you get information aimed at computer programmers that wish to implement parts of the standard or write applications dealing with multilingual text.

   Though this book is very long (~800 pages) it is still shorter and a lot more clear than the Unicode standard itself (over 1000 pages).

   Code examples are in Java but they are not ment to be complete solutions and so there is no accompanying website or a CD.

   Professional programmers are the target audience of this book. The reader is faced with many topics in linguistics, history and data structures. Readers with computer science background would probably appreciate how classic traditional algorithms were adapted and how data structures are used in character sets with a significantly larger number of character than 256.

   The author of the book states that the book is about "representing written language in a computer", which may be misleading to some readers. The book is about the Unicode standard. Obviously, there are many other ways to represent written language other than the methods described in the book. As chapter 2 teaches... There are always more ways (sometimes better ways) to represent your data.

   Part 2 of the book will not cover every writing system of the world. A better book for that would be "The world's writing systems".

   Part3 is probably the most interesting and useful part for programmers (though the first part is important, in my opinion to those who want to UNDERSTAND Unicode).
   You can learn about a lot of things and skip many too (depending on your interest and need). I believe that most readers will skip most of the topics.

   This is not a book that is read lightly, but it is hellovalot easier and more fun to read than the Unicode standard itself. It appears that once you read this book and get what you want from it, you will end up going to read the Unicode standard only to see updates, hopefully, not for clarifications.

   I am dealing with Natural Language Processing and being a Hebrew speaker I also have a lot of text in Hebrew (almost all the time it is Hebrew with other languages too, e.g. documents that contain Hebrew with some English). This book helps understand the difficulties, the current implementations and give you a solid ground to start thinking how you can make things better. Current infrastructure for Hebrew is either poor or not perfect and in most cases the better solutions are proprietary. There seems to be always problems representing 'plain' text in more than one language without stepping into the trap of the soup of different ways to do it. Unicode is one way to do it (arguably, not the best, yet it is alive and growing) I hope this book can help more people understand what they are up against, clear the fog and help people do better implementations.




4. This book is an outstanding companion volume to the Unicode standard. In fact, if you had to pick one, you'd quite possibly be better off owning this book INSTEAD of the standard. The author display an impressive knowledge of the world's writing systems and of the inner workings of the Unicode standardization process.

   Part I of this book starts with the history of character encoding standards, from Morse code to today. It then presents a thorough review of the Unicode architecture and associated standards. The information presented was mostly excellent, although I found the section describing SCSU a little bit too sketchy (and the actual code in part III not entirely satisfactory to fill in the gaps).

   Part II gives an overview of the various writing systems and character ranges represented in Unicode. Even for a nontechnical audience, this part would be fascinating with all the typographical and historical trivia it presents.

   Part III discusses various algorithms applicable to text processing in a Unicode context. I must admit that I found this part a bit of a letdown. Many of the algoritms are only sketched out because discussing them in detail would be beyond the scope of the book. Quite possibly, the pages dedicated to these algorithms would have been better spent presenting examples of code using the various existing APIs for handling Unicode (Java, ICU, Perl, Windows, MacOS X).

   This does not take away from the fact that this is a great book that any programmer interested in Unicode should own.




5. Reader would learn a lot about Unicode and many unique problem of different scripts. For example, it is not one glyph for traditional "character" nor one code for one traditional "character". I also recommend readers also read source code of pango library and manual of freetype library.

2 comments about Pro Novell Open Enterprise Server (Pro).

1. If you are NetWare 5x administrator, this is good documents for maigrate into Novell Openenterprise Server(OES). There are differences between Linux and NetWare version. And how can I create NSS volume on SuSE Linux system. A lot of pictures.



2. I have a long background with Netware but not so much with Linux, and I've been trying to get a handle on Open Enterprise Server on SUSE Linux. I can find plenty of information on running virtually any distribution of Linux, but OES Linux is a pretty different beast. I think this book is particularly great for someone trying to make the transition from Netware to Linux. It seems to do a great job of introducing essential linux tools for administration, as well as how the Novell management tools tie everything together. I think the book has most everything you'd need to know about how to run the OES Netware kernel, but it mostly just introduces the Linux side of things. However, that's fine for me. Once I know what the proper tools are for a given situation, I'm more than able to go research command-line options etc on my own. There are plenty of other books for that.

1 comments about Quick Recipes on Symbian OS: Mastering C++ Smartphone Development (Symbian Press).

1. This is a good Symbian programming book. It provides solutions to many common mobile programming tasks and can also enhance your awareness of existing Symbian facilities.
   
   Symbian is a feature-rich operating system and it being a mobile OS has many constraints. With each Recipe the book summarizes security constraints and programming gotcha's one may encounter when utilizing various Symbian features.
   
   To me the book could be longer, but a Volume II would also be welcome. When I want to expand my mind vis a vis Symbian functional possibilities, or the next time I can't just search and find a solution, I'll turn to this book.

No comments about Writing Device Drivers, Tutorial and Reference.

4 comments about Programming Visual Basic for the Palm OS (O'Reilly Palm).

1. This book was VERY well written. Especially it gives great examples of building and debugging conduits. Unfortunately, it completely bypasses talking about how to build as installer for the conduit.

   I bought the book specifically to build conduits and this left me only 50% satisfied.




2. This book is directed at users of AppForge for VB6. AppForge is an excellent VB add-in that lets you quickly develop Palm apps in VB. You don't need a book to help you develop in App Forge.
   AppForge is very weak, however, in the Conduit and installer areas since it offers no help unless you buy the Professional version for [price] which includes the Universal Conduit. Again, if you've got that, you don't need this book to develop the conduit.
   Writing a Conduit on your own is tough and I was hoping this OReilly book would help. Sadly, all the relevant conduit info. from chapter 4 is available for free on the OReilly web site [URL]. Chapter 4 is poorly written and organized, has typos and errors and the sample code you download from the web site will not load or compile in VB6.
   I was hoping the book had much more than the sample chapter I saw on the web site. I was disappointed. If you're looking for help with Palm Conduit development in VB6, look elsehwere.



3. Collaboratively written by computer experts Matthew Holmes, Patrick Burton, and Roger Knoell, Programming Visual Basic for Palm OS is a solid and reliable programmer's guide to designing effective applications, transferring data to the PDA, building security through data encryption, and much more. Focusing especially on using AppForge to write programs, Visual Basic for Palm OS also covers SQL databases, Piedmont, and a great deal more. Step-by-step instructions, sample programs, excellent diagrams and comprehensible flowcharts make Programming Visual Basic for Palm OS a first-class reference and a highly recommended self-teaching tool.



4. Good book from two perspectives: if you use AppForge for Palm development then this is a complete (slightly dated) book, or if you use MS VB6 for conduits or Palm-flavored web applications with IIS. Almost everything in the book is backed up with running code.

   As an aside, I am not sure if the previous reviewer actually read the book or tried to run the code. There are very few typos in the chapter mentioned (which is online) and I didn't see any errors. For me, the code worked fine; the book specifically mentions VB6 and service pack 3.

No comments about A History of Computer Operating Systems: Unix, DOS, Lisa, Macintosh, Windows, Linux.

No comments about Learning the Unix Operating System: Student Workbook.