C & C++ Code Capsules: A Guide for Practitioners

For a more detailed review, please see my Devil's Advocate column in UNIX Reveiw/Performance Computing Feb'99

When we served together on the C++ standards committee the highest compliment Chuck ever paid my proposals was to call them "practical", and it is my pleasure to return that compliment. This is one of the most truly practical books on C and C++ you could hope to own. Not just for the useful example code, and not just for the down-to-earth, easy-to-read text, but for Chuck's clear understanding of what it is a practitioner really needs to know, and his unique ability to get that knowledge across.

One of the hardest things about learning a programming language is discovering how to use it the natives do. This book allows programmers of all skill levels to improve their use of C++. As a long-time C programmer the C capsules were interesting and vindicated opinions I had held for a long time. The C++ capsules helped me to gain proficiency, helping me to feel like I am now an expert with C++.My favorite use of this book is to help settle "style" discussions. Finding a code capsule that discusses why the position I'm supporting has some definite benefits makes it easier to get the point accross.I put this book right on the shelf next to Scott Meyers' two books (Effective C++ & More Effective C++) and Jim Coplein's Advanced C++ as "read once a year".

As a professional programmer I had forgotten why I enjoyed programming to begin with. Staying up late with friends fiddling with this or that language idiosyncrasy. Breaking application modules down to smaller and more representative code capsules to illustrate a language or compiler nuance. 'Code Capsules' is written in that easy, friendly style that makes you want to sit with your laptop and try out little code snippets in the compiler over a pizza. Chuck Allison's extensive knowledge and experience with C and C++ creates a comfortable writing style that will gently draw out more than a few "Ahhhh, so that's why ...". If you are learning C++, 'Code Capsules' will help you understand the language; if you are a professional programmer, 'Code Capsules' will make you a better one; and if you just enjoy programming languages, 'Code Capsules' is your best friend, now all you need is the pizza. Thank you, Chuck!

I had a great start of 1998 when I acquired this newly published book at the beginning of the year. This book exceeds the expectation on which the title conveys and gears itself towards the practicing C++ professionals. Although the first six chapters talk about "preliminaries", experienced practitioners can also benefit vastly by revisiting the core fundamentals on which this book is based: "I have found too many developers ill-prepared to master C++ because they lack a thorough understanding of basic concepts such as pointers, scope ... and the biggest deficiency of all is a lack of familiarity with the standard C library." One of the best feature of this book is that it is packed with examples and interesting language manipulations while simultaneously alerting on common pitfalls, and reading the "code capsules" alone makes good revision and time investment, and surprisingly, it also provides new insights on our knowledge, or lackof. As this book constitutes the anthology of articles contributed by the author to a leading computer magazine over a period of time, the only downside of this book is the inconsistent declaration and definition of main() with and without the explicit return type and return value. Overall, this book is highly readable and is very interesting to read, and it encourages repeated readings that reinforce more and better understandings. This book is an indispensable tool for the current or aspiring practitioners.