
C: The Complete Nonsense - fogus
http://www.seebs.net/c/c_tcn4e.html
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makecheck
It seems like it used to mean more to be published. Somehow, the mere
existence of your book on the shelf made it clear that a high standard for
quality had been met. In recent years, especially in technical books, this
doesn't seem to be true anymore.

One problem is that there's 40 books on any given subject. Each time a new
language or tech comes along, there are lots of publishers wanting to be the
ones to sell millions of copies. From the point of view of revenue, each
publisher has about the same chance of making a sale to an unsuspecting buyer,
so it almost doesn't "matter" (to them) if a book has errors everywhere.

Another problem is that the industry moves so quickly. Who cares what was
published even 5 years ago in tech, in most cases? The problem is, any true
experts in a new field won't be working at publishing companies, they'll be
doing the high-paying jobs building the actual products. So unless the author
sees an error, no one else will, before the book goes to print.

The responsibility then falls to the _consumers_ of books. If you want
accuracy, you need a more peer-reviewed model; or, simply, peers, for asking
questions. Something like Wikipedia has both the immediacy of the web and the
accuracy of a huge number of eyeballs (minus a contingent of vandals that
seems insignificant in practice).

~~~
alextgordon
_From the point of view of revenue, each publisher has about the same chance
of making a sale to an unsuspecting buyer, so it almost doesn't "matter" (to
them) if a book has errors everywhere._

I think this used to be true, but I buy all my books on Amazon now and I can
choose the book with the best rating.

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tokenadult
Please remind those of us reading this thread who are less familiar with the
reliable books on the subject what books are good books about C. I know about
K & R, but what else do busy C programmers recommend?

After edit: when you know a book is crap, do you say so in reviews on
Amazon.com? That's helpful for people browsing books by subject.

~~~
Jun8
I found Peter van der Linden's _Expert C Programming_ to be excellent, and, as
a bonus, fun to read (which you can't really say of _K &R_).

~~~
rmaccloy
Word (although I find K&R a pleasant read). My copy is at the office; I often
take a quick glance through it when I need to poke at some C code and usually
end up spotting latent bugs.

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andreyf
Why the mean-spirited tone and expose? Why not just submit the errata as he
sees it?

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Bjoern
I think that from "I spent about a decade on the C committee—and [2] unlike
Schildt, I actually showed up [..]" we can assume that he has some kind of
history with the person in question [1].

Peter seems also to get quite some share of hate mail [3]. Despite all that
and the tone of the book review I think he is quite right about the bad
quality of the book.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writings_of_Herbert_Schildt> [2] Peter
Seebach, <http://www.seebs.net/res-w.html> [3]
<http://www.seebs.net/humor/hate.html>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_I spent about a decade on the C committee_

I know this sounds mean, but whenever they say they spent a decade on a
committee, I can almost guarantee you that the next thing they say will be
true yet inconsequential.

I say this because I have done my share of proof-reading C and C++ books. And
there are a lot of errors. But that's not the worst of it. The worst books
don't teach you anything, are full of errors, and the author continues to try
to impress you with his work on the standards. The best books teach you and
have a few errors that you will figure out on your own.

(I got into the proof-reading and writing biz years ago for a couple of years.
How? By writing a letter about how book X was so full of mistakes it was
unreadable. So I speak from experience)

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DCoder
Related: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.06.html#subj12>

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rbanffy
I just imagined a hilariously awkward social encounter between Christian and
Herbert Schildt, perhaps in a book signing.

"We meet again, Mr... Seebs"

I wanted to share this with those with similarly distorted imaginations.

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vmmenon
Not sure what the point is in bashing a book thats known to be crap.

~~~
megablast
There is nothing more annoying that when you are learning to program, and you
get some error due to the examples.

You check everything, recheck names, and it still crashes.

You try to find out if you are using the compiler right, if you have the
correct version, still crashes.

So you try to type it in another editor, maybe the editor is adding CRLF from
dos, and the compiler is expecting Unix EOL, nope, still crashing.

Maybe there is a problem with the machine, so try a different machine, nope,
still crashing.

It is enough to turn anyone off of computer science. When you are first
starting out, there are so many things that already can go wrong, and so much
to learn. This is just bad!

~~~
heresy
I get the sense Herb hasn't moved with the times, and is pretty much stuck in
the ways that served him before the internet, hence the lack of improvement.

How bad do you have to be to not continuously improve what you did before?
Also, his examples to me scream that he hasn't or doesn't really write code
for a living, or if he does, it's with a community of other fossils like him.

I can't respect any programming book writer who doesn't have some kind of
automation in place to ensure all his code samples (1) compile, and (2) work
as expected.

Basic stuff nowadays.

And even me, with not very much C cred, can see his C code is clearly not
idiomatic for C these days, if you compare it to some well-written OSS C.

