Browse Books

Reviewer: David Thomas Barnard

This is a practical book, written by an experienced programmer for other programmers. It provides a mass of helpful information and working examples of the use of a number of tools: shell scripts, make, SCCS, lex, yacc, dbx, X/Motif, and a handful of other components. The information and examples will be very useful to an inexperienced programmer, because the system documentation does not present the material in as accessible a manner. However, the book has a number of deficiencies. There are distressingly many grammatical and typographical glitches (I stopped keeping track after detecting errors on both pages of the preface and the first four pages of the first chapter). There are places where the required background is not made clear, and where the examples assume more knowledge of other aspects of the system than might be available to the programmer who needs this book. The selection of topics is not always well motivated. Finally, while the examples are a strength of the book, the programming style is sometimes cryptic and certainly not “literate.”