Browse Books

Reviewer: John George Fletcher

To accept this books claim that “it may be used as a one-semester or two-quarter introduction to computer programming for freshman or sophomore computer science, business, social science, or physical science majors” would be a mistake. The book consists of 15 chapters and five appendices. The chapter titles are as follows: Getting Started Basic Structure and Data Types Modular Programming String Functions and Loops Branching Using Menus Text Files Page and Control Breaks Multilevel Control Breaks Arrays and Sorting Multidimension Arrays Sequential Files Updating Sequential Files Structured and Random Files Indexed Files Working their way through these chapters, students are exposed to excruciatingly detailed explications of many business-oriented C programs that primarily do only the following: prompt for and accept typed input data; write the data into a record-oriented file; retrieve the data from the file; and output the data. Input to these programs is quite primitive. For example, a user who makes an error while building a file has no way to go back and fix it, and array bounds are not always checked. Data manipulation consists almost entirely of calculating totals; in a very few instances, simple sequential searches and bubble or shell sorts are performed. The programs are divided into what the author calls “modules,” that is, void-valued functions taking no arguments and communicating using global variables. Local variables seldom occur, and few if any functions are usable in more than one program. Only where demanded by the IO library do we see addresses (as arguments of scanf ) or pointers (those of type FILE *), and the connection between the two is never discussed. Many aspects of C are not mentioned (for example, that “break” can occur outside switches and that structures can be array elements), but readers are not referred to the C manual for further details. In fact, there are no references at all. Labels and the goto construction are introduced, only to be immediately described as best avoided, however. This warning is appropriate, because one of the two examples of their use has a severe bug. It would be disturbing to imagine that a text this limited and elementary could really be appropriate for college students (or anyone else).