Showing posts with label programming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label programming. Show all posts

C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition Review

C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition
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C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition ReviewI have browsed some C and C++ books in major bookstores to see how the materials are organized and presented. This one was not a book I had a chance to browse, but one which I had to buy for an extension course (Introductory C Programming) at UCLA last summer.
At first I thought King's book was hard because of a certain depth of penetration into elements of good programming practices with examples one after another. As I became serious and started to reading intently, I found out how effective King was in paving the way toward a comprehensive understanding of C programming through worked out code and annotations. King is very skilled in breaking down and building up C code, unlike certain celebrated C programming language experts who apparently do not care to be clear or are simply ineffective. So my conclusion is: Read this each chapter of this book very closely, carefully and seriously, and try to understand every last point King is raising. Also, do not neglect working out some of his exercises at the end of each chapter for the benefit of practice as well as learning C. In almost every chapter of the book, he gives very good, organized and annotated but not tedious and complex examples. The problems are generally reasonable and hardly ever too complicated because I never found them overwhelming, either from a coding perspective or mathematically. Perhaps it is because King comes across as someone who emphasizes organization, detail, clarity and explanation in his style of presentation. There are no problems dealing with heavy scientific or engineering applications for those who dread them.
Great points: (1) Fundamentals - beginning chapters goes into detail for a solid grounding of C language basics (syntax, etc.); and (2) Pointers - excellent exposition with examples, diagrams and exercises, extremely well presented for the starters who easily get confused by what pointers in C are all about; and (3) Ideas are very well connected from chapter to chapter -- some chapters are even as great as stand-alone ones for referencing. The only problems I found were: (1) Description of struct types, which are passed by value from function to function -- implied but not clearly or succintly stated in the book (compare the description in the excellent book by Kelley and Pohl, "A Book in C"); (2) Chapter on program design, which I found to be very terse and scanty in terms of information topics about designing medium size to large C programs -- also jumps into encapsulation and C++ too soon and leaves out one too many basic ideas in C program organization -- "Look before you leap", C++ is object-oriented, and is therefore much more complex and evolved, so why do too much of C++ when one must learn basics of ANSI C well beforehand!
For some reason, I feel strongly that King is following the writing style and presentation of the classical work in C programming by Kernighan and Ritchie. He even discusses the significant contributions of Kernighan in establishing the C language as the mainstay of modern programming for all kinds of applications. There are some uncanny resemblance in style and other parallels I sense in his book. King also retains a lot of the clarity in thinking and intrinsic simplicity reflected in Kernighan and Ritchie's writing style.
Because of the lengthy chapters and reading required, this is not the best ANSI C reference book in my view. Kelley and Pohl's excellent paperback, entitled "A Book in C", does far better in that respect. However, King has more good illustrated examples in his book for the newcomer. You will like his book if you like Kernighan and Ritchie's paperback classic. In fact, King has more for you. The only caveat may be that any newcomer would be well advised to try to understand a little about C before attempting to read the book, because only afterwards does King's treatment only makes sense and becomes meaningful and stimulating. Also, it may help out considerably if one finds a good instructor to teach ANSI C in formal classroom environment using King's book here (as I did last summer at UCLA Extension).
All in all: A very good no-nonsense book for the motivated beginner in C programming.C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition Overview

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Spring Python 1.1 Review

Spring Python 1.1
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Spring Python 1.1 ReviewSpring Python 1.1 is a book for professional programmers who either wish
to venture into a world beyond traditional OOP and tackle problems
differently thanks to Spring Python's IoC & AOP features or simply have
practical issues - such as spreading the application across multiple
nodes - to solve. The book does not merely rephrase the comprehensive
reference documentation available at the project's website and I was
actually very curious on how the author would be laying out the material.
Greg took a very good approach of explaining the basic of IoC first and
building upon it in subsequent chapters although they can all be read
separately. All of the major Spring Python's building blocks are covered
and I can only applaud that despite its Java roots almost no XML is used
- that's a good news for all Python programmers fearing that "Spring"
means a lot of unnecessary XML, the prevailing majority of examples is
in pure Python. Java programmers wishing to leverage their existing
Spring skills won't be disappointed though as there are some chapters
devoted to how one can easily migrate a Spring Java IoC container over
to Spring Python one, there's also a discussion of how to use Spring
Python & Jython which, along with CPython, is also a target Python
implementation Spring Python can run on. But let that not confuse you,
the book is mostly written for Python programmers.
I liked it that the book was focusing on getting things done without
turning aside into discussing vaguely related concepts or nuances, for
instance the chapter on SQL doesn't do any 'quick recaps' of what SQL
and relational databases are as is unfortunately quite common in many
other books. On the other hand, not everyone is familiar with IoC and
AOP and I know that anyone unfamiliar with those concepts - regardless
of their primary programming language of choice - can easily take the
book and get acquainted with them. A superb idea was that most of the
chapters teach you how to write unit tests for the given Spring Python
component you'd want to use in your code, IoC, AOP, security, database
access and so on, that's an often neglected area and I was very happy to
see the author having placed an importance on it. Another good idea was
to create a case-study chapter which combines all the knowledge and
discusses it thoroughly.
All in all, it's a good book written by a practitioner for
practitioners, full of diagrams and examples that by necessity are
simple yet don't feel contrived and it's certainly not something you
need to plough through, it does a very good job of introducing the
reader to Spring Python and showing how to use its pluggable components
to write interesting and useful applications solving real-world
problems. If I were to pick a nit I'd only say that it would be nice if
the second edition contained at least a couple of examples of using
Spring Python's IoC YamlConfig, but that's only a matter of syntax so
the issue is really minor.Spring Python 1.1 Overview

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A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web Review

A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web
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A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web ReviewNot only does A Developer's Guide to Semantic Web offer an excellent introduction to "what is" Semantic Web, but it also guides the readers onto the "how to" stage with assiduously, almost mind-numbingly easy to understand, step by step coding examples. Needless to say, the author has an amazing grasp of the Semantic web technology himself. Unlike some quite complicated and mind-boggling books on Semantic Web, A Developer's Guide to Semantic Web is easy to comprehend, therefore an outstanding tool. Concepts such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and well-known applications such as FOAF, Wiki, DBpedi and LOD are brilliantly illustrated with ample coding examples. The last section of the book weaves all of them together with raw examples of running applications, which are readily available for use. This is a must-read for students, researchers, software engineers and developers who are interested in the Semantic Web technology. Highly recommended.A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web Overview

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Game Engine Architecture Review

Game Engine Architecture
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Game Engine Architecture ReviewJason Gregory's book offers a 10,000-foot view of game engine architecture, covering every system found in modern game engines, and detailing how those systems interact. It details the subjects at a level easily understood by anyone with a modest level of programming experience -- even non-programmers can gain a solid understanding of engine design from the book. This would make a great first book for anyone interested in programming game engines, either as a hobby or a future career.
However, it is important to clarify the limits of the book. I do not consider this to be a programming book, since it does not present the material at a sufficiently low-level that would permit an inexperienced programmer to implement a game engine from the ground-up. It describes how the algorithms work in enough detail that you can understand the idea, but does not present complete code examples that would demonstrate exactly how the algorithms would be implemented. There are occasional code snippets, and brief examples from engines like Ogre, Unreal, and idtech. But most of the content is entirely prose.
Experienced programmers/game devs have the coding background to implement many of the designs described in the book from the level at which they are presented. But neophyte programmers will not find enough details in this book to implement a full game engine on their own. However, no one book could do an adequate job of detailing how to implement an entire game engine: learning to program a game engine from the ground-up requires a very large stack of books (especially for physics and AI). So it would be unfair to fault this book for what it is not.
The value of the book is in providing clear, prose descriptions of the functional blocks found in a game engine, covering alternate ways different engines implement certain features, and cross-referencing how those blocks interact.
Another positive is that the book benefits from a mature writing style. Unlike the "Oh wow! Cool! Dude! Whew, math is hard! {BG}" style of writing inflicted upon many intro/for-teens books, this book can be read by adults (and most teens) without any undue eye-rolling due to bad writing. Which, sad to say, is why I feel inclined to remark on this point. Granted, this book was written for a course a SoCal, so a more mature writing still is required. I do wish more games-related books would follow this convention, instead of assuming the reader is mentally bereft or a pre-teen.Game Engine Architecture Overview

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