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C Interfaces and Implementations by David Hanson Highly Recommended

ISBN: 0 201 49841 3       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 519pp       Price: £31-95

Categories:   advanced c

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 9-4 (May 1997)

The author seems to have reached the same destination. I do not know if this is through the same influences or if he arrived independently. What I do know is that the end result is a book that I would highly commend to any serious C programmer.

I have no doubt that the K&R devotees who consider anything that happened to C post 1980 to be disastrous will completely disagree. Those who program small PROMs for embedded systems have an excuse because their priority must be squeezing the executable into the available space but the rest should move on.

Now I know that some of you will say 'Yes, move on to C++' but (Bjarne Stroustrup will have to forgive me when he reads this) for some the complexities of C++ coupled with its still buggy definition mitigates against its use for safety critical code. In addition, I think that those who take responsibility for the mission critical code they write would be well justified in sticking with C. Those that do not take responsibility shouldn't be writing such code but... (accounts code is virtually always mission critical yet many are happy to write it directly in C++ or indirectly by using such applications as Excel)
One interesting aspect of this book is that it is written as 'literate programs' (Knuth--literate programming).

I would encourage serious C programmers to study this book (that means reading and re-reading until understanding occurs). In the short term it is easy to claim that you do not have time to make this kind of effort. In the long term you do not have time not to. Certainly, unemployed programmers should use their forced rest time in honing their skills with such study.