ACCU Reviews: Software Solutions in C

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Book Review

Software Solutions in C by Dale Schumacher
Highly Recommended

ISBN: 0-12-632360-7 Publisher: Academic Press Pages: 463 pages+disk Price: £34-95

Categories: advanced c

Reviewed by Ian Cargill in C Vu 7-6 (Sep 1995)

While there is a surfeit of C books for beginners, there are all too few books which show the intermediate programmer how to use C to solve practical problems. Software Solutions in C is an excellent book which does just that. This book is a collaborative effort and with one exception the chapters are all by different authors. This can often be a recipe for disaster, so credit to the editor that the book reads pretty much as though it has single author. The authors include some world experts, such as Doug Gwyn and Henry Spencer - and it shows in the quality of the material presented.

Each chapter stands alone and describes code which the authors have written for real-world applications, not just as examples for the book. I haven't read every chapter in depth, but the half dozen that I have read were uniformly good. A perusal of the other chapters indicates that they are just as good. Most chapters go much further than simply explaining the code (which comes on a disc). They also explain the context in which the code is used, how they were developed (some over several years), what design decisions were taken - and why - and some of the problems and limitations.

The fifteen chapters are grouped into five categories:

String Operations
Portability
Databases
Expression Evaluation
Numerical Methods

Two to five programs are described in each category. For example, in the String Operations category, the chapters are:

Dynamic Strings and Lists
Fast String Searching
A Regular-Expression Matcher

I should mention that although the code is generally quite high quality, it is not all ISO C. That is not a criticism, by the way. The book doesn't pretend to present ISO C, just good C solutions. There is no reason why they shouldn't include non-ISO code. There is still a lot around and I think it is important that professional programmers are at least familiar with K&R style code, even if they don't write it. Besides, what you are seeing is genuine, 'industrial' code and some was written pre-ISO.

The only major blunder that I picked up was in Chapter 2. Doug Gwyn gives the result of a string matching algorithm and enjoins readers to 'Make sure you understand why this is the correct output before proceeding'. Unfortunately, gremlins at the printers typeset it so the answer is wrong! Don't hold Doug to task - it wasn't his fault.

I really like this book. I think it would be a good book for any C programmer to read. Not because everything in the code is perfect - it isn't - but because it gives you the chance to see how and why some very talented programmers wrote some real-world code.

Last Update - 13 May 2001.

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