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C++ Communications Utilities by Michael Holmes & Bob Flanders Recommended

ISBN: 1-56276-110-2       Publisher: Ziff-Davis       Pages: 523pp+disk       Price: £27-45

Categories:   internals and hardware     advanced c++

Reviewed by Chris Hills in C Vu 6-4 (May 1994)

What one gets on the disc is a simple DOS comms program complete with drop down menus, an auto dialler, phone book, X, X-CRC and Y-Batch Modem file transfer, class 1 fax send and receive capabilities and a separate TSR background file transfer program. The disc contains executable and source code with make files for Borland C++ 3.1 and Microsoft C/C++ v7.

The book is essentially about how to write a comms program with each chapter adding more features. After each short chapter is the fully annotated source code with additions and modifications. The code on the disc unpacks into chapter sub-directories. The book runs through dumb terminal, modem control, phone book number control, file transfer and fax. Each building on to the program in chapter one.

There are some useful appendices i.e. full program manuals for both the comms program and the background transfer TSR and a complete UART reference. NB The comms program can access COM1 to COM8 (if present)
There is very little in the way of structured design methods. This is my only real criticism. For someone looking at comms (rather than design) this will not be a problem.

The text often refers to procedures and one has to look in the source code for them as there are no code fragments in the text. At the end of each chapter a table lists all the current modules, indicating the chapter they were introduced or the last chapter they were modified in. The list also gives the module description.

The book is not as the title suggests a cook book of routines. All the code, whilst designed to work with this program, is OO. Therefore it should be usable in other programs, though I think the authors intend people to expand on this program. They freely admit that there are many areas that could be improved upon, e.g. integrated editors and log files.

For those with some assembler the background TSR is briefly covered in the book, but the full assembler listing and documentation is on the disc.

Incidentally the program works. It is not as slick as commercial ones (or the main shareware ones) but that gives you something to do after reading the book... NB Note to the publisher, ZIFF DAVIS. Make it a series. Database, Spreadsheet, Word Processor and a C compiler.

CONCLUSION: There are better comms programs but even shareware will cost more than this book/program. If you need a comms program and want to learn about comms you could do much worse. A novel idea that works. Recommended.