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The Standard C Library by Plauger Highly Recommended

ISBN: 13-131509-9       Publisher: Prentice Hall       Pages: 498pp       Price: £29-95.

Categories:   reference     beginner's c

Reviewed by John Gameson in C Vu 4-3 (Mar 1992)

Next comes the main part of the chapter consisting of the header file (be warned - this is where the going gets tough!) and finally a test function is given for checking the header. Many of the tests are simply "assert" calls. The book contains about 9000 lines of code showing Dr Plauger's way of implementing the ANSI/ISO C standard libraries based on his aim of making the code as readable and as exemplary as possible. Dr. Plauger also includes a few exercises at the end of each chapter suitable for university courses, although the book has not been written specifically as a text book.

Very briefly Dr Plauger has made his header files suitable for UNIX, MSDOS and other implementations. He does this by making each header file include other subsidiary headers or functions. These are then individually tailored to suit the appropriate host system. The result is quite a complex hierarchy that is not always easy to keep track of. The complete set of libraries is implemented and although the coverage of the host system dependent code is restricted to only a few possibilities it bears all the hallmarks of the rest of Dr. Plauger's code. Examples are included for such innovations as the locale functions, wide characters and multi-byte characters e.g. Japanese Kanji . This is a first class book and a true 'piece de resistance'. I can recommend it without hesitation not only to anyone who has to write functions for ANSI/ISO C, but to others who want a better understanding of these standards; indeed those who want to write other functions will no doubt find themselves emulating or adapting it to their own needs (the code is copyright). The code has been tested on Borland, Microsoft, Project Gnu, Saber, Sun UNIX and VAX ULTRIX compilers as well as being validated on the Plum Hall Suite. There is the inevitable Companion Disk - available from the US C User's Group for $49.95.