Choice Review

A book for people who already know how to program in at least one language, and want to learn to program in C. The authors, recognizing that most college graduates have usually been exposed to Pascal, make many references to concepts in the Pascal language to give the reader insight into the C language features being discussed. The book contains a large amount of useful information about usage of the standard C library routines. Beyond the discussion of C as a language, the authors also go through a thorough example of creating a mailing list system, and an example of how one would manage the development of the system using applicable Unix tools. This is extremely valuable to a person learning C, since a newcomer to C is usually a newcomer to Unix as well. The authors discuss conventions for writing Unix tools, how to read command line arguments, how to handle input and output, and how to return to an exit status during program termination. Many useful appendixes summarize and tabulate reference information. Exercises with answers are provided throughout the text. Upper-division and graduate levels. -F. H. Wild, III, University of Rhode Island