Buck Rogers said:
Hi guys!
Does anyone have a link to a site that provides up to date
programming book reviews?
I looked through the reviews at:
http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/public/index.htm
Unfortunately, the books reviewed were published
between 1990 and 2000.
I'd prefer a review of books that are currently available,
namely Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days 6th edition.
Amazon only has 3 reviews for it, and the rest for
previous editions - I had 4th edition and found it to be
good overall (linked list section was confusing though).
Anyone here using the current 6 th edition? What do you
think? I am buying it tomorrow.
Buck.
Well, I have only read the 4th edition. I found out though(through
time) that the book is actually absolute garbage. After reading it, I
had some horrible misconceptions. Namely, not understanding that
arrays and pointers are really completely different and as peter van
der linden says in his book(Expert C programming) "is like confusing
ints with floats" or something along those lines..
This is from the chapter on pointers in Teach YourSelf C in 21 days
"An array name without brackets is a pointer to the array's first
element. Thus, if you've declared an array data[], data is the address
of the first array element." and "You've seen that the name of an
array is a pointer to the array."
But they fail to make any distinction between object and value
context(which chris torek has some nice tutorials on this subject that
everyone should read)
They also claim C has passing by reference.. from chapter 18:
"There is another way to pass an argument to a function, however: by
passing a pointer to the argument variable rather than the value of
the variable itself. This method of passing an argument is called
passing by reference."
C passes by value you only. I don't think the authors are qualified to
write a book on C. They don't even understand the difference between
"passing by reference" and "passing a reference".
Some examples in the book use gets()..
They also claim multi-dimensional arrays exist in C.. when they can
only be simulated with arrays of arrays..
They don't teach you how to read C declarations(any book about C
should cover this imo).
imo, I wouldn't bother with any new editions from this book. The
mistakes in the 4th edition are so serious that you can conclude they
really aren't an expert with this language and have no business
writing a book about the language.
I think they should rename the book to "Teach Yourself C in 21 days
with misconceptions" -- I think this is being more honest and allows a
person to ignore it instead of wasting their money on it.
Some good books on C though would have to be Expert C programming and
k&r2, unless you already have them.
