[Home Page] - [Reviews Main]

C++ for Engineers by Bramer Recommended

ISBN: 0-340-64584-9       Publisher: Arnold       Pages: 468pp + disk       Price: £20

Categories:   advanced c++     internals and hardware

Reviewed by Chris Hills in C Vu 9-1 (Nov 1996)

The style is the same as all the other Bramer books. It starts with a simple introduction to computer hardware, memory and through binary to assembler. I expect to find this introduction in the Bramer books on 4GLs if they ever do them! Apart from the C++ there are chapters on program design and documentation, in broad terms that address the fact that coding takes up less than 20% of most software projects.

The C++ chapters take the reader through the nuts and bolts of the language in a logical fashion before going into classes. By the time one reaches classes one knows what to put in them and how to use them. There is a fair amount of code in the book, it is well annotated and all of the source is on the included disc.

The exercises and examples have been designed to be of use to computing and electronics students. The book has been designed as a course text and a set of files to help prepare slides and other material for use in lectures is available by email (and ftp) from the author.

There are many useful comments and notes from someone who has obviously seen (lots of) students helping Murphy prove his laws. There is a salutary exercise demonstrating how many different values one can get from the same line of source code, depending on which compiler is used. This demonstration of the order of evaluation has a fascinating set of results.

The final chapter is another Bramer trade mark, i.e. doing something with hardware. This chapter will show you how to directly address PC video ram, play with the IO, use interrupts and directly driving the serial ports. Most of the rest of the software and book should work for other systems and it has been tested on various flavours of UNIX including Linux.

This is a good C++ book with a slightly different perspective to that of the usual flood of C++ books. I find it a refreshing change, but then I started life in hardware as well.