Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.6425
EAN: 9780201036695
ISBN: 020103669X
Label: Addison-Wesley Professional
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1976-06
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Studio: Addison-Wesley Professional
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Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
First, I don't have to reintroduce how awesome the author (especially bwk) is. I will just jump to the main topic.
This book, by any means, is better than Code Complete(CC). Don't get me wrong, I am not saying CC is a bad book. To the contrary, CC is a very good book. But this book is still better. Why, here are three reasons.
1. CC is motivated by this book, Software Tools(ST). If you read carefully, you will find that in the preface of CC, it says that "No comparable book is available... some had written 15 years or more earlier ... in Ratfor". Tell you want, it refers to this book(ST). ST deserves a better position than "a 15 years old book in Ratfor", because it handles a even wider topic than CC: how to build practical software. Thus, if you like CC, I will recommend you to this book. If you think CC is verbose, bingo, you have a better choice: this book.
2. ST talks every almost every aspect of programming and tells you how to build into the ... Read More
Rating: -
I read this book about 20 years back. And I keep quoting it and recommending it, and re-reading it. This is because it changed my whole perspective about writing software. Let me share the two big lessons I learnt.
The first was ego-less programming. Sharing the code and encouraging feedback. We applied this in our group with amazing results. It is a valuable lesson because it is so tough to implement - because of our ego.
The big one was about not writing applications but tools. And creating applications from tools. This lesson kept haunting me whenever I wrote any program. It helped me write generic programs that could be re-used.
The Ratfor examples are a bit dated now. But they elegant and pure.
A must read for all aspire for excellence in coding software.
Rating: -
The tools you will find in this book are ancient. They're written in a cockeyed hybrid of C and Fortran, and they're almost hilariously user-hostile by modern definitions. If this intimidates you, look at it this way -- you're looking under the hood of modern applications. Much modern word processing, page layout, and language implementation can be built by putting a nice, shiny coating on what you find in this book.
Kernighan and Plauger set out in this book to document what they used in their labs at the time it was written, and show how to build them. Ratfor was chosen because C was not as widespread then as it is now, and for those who didn't have it, a translator to standard Fortran '77 was one of the major parts of the book. A simplified version of the nroff text formatter and a version of ed are also included for text file processing (then as now one of the major uses for computers), the result being both a toolkit and a practical education in the ins and outs of applications ... Read More
Rating: -
Elsewhere on Amazon I reviewed Kernighan's "Elements of Programming Style." To quote one paragraph from that review -
Brian Kernighan has co-authored three books almost essential to learning our craft, this volume, "Software Tools" and "The Unix Programming Environment". "Elements of Programming Style" spells out the fundamental rules, "Software Tools" shows you how to apply them to a number of simple projects and extends the rules to software design and finally "The Unix Programming Environment" shows you how to use them in an operating system designed to reward you for your effort.
It could be said that "Elements" teaches programming and "Software Tools" teaches software design. Rules such as "do just one thing, do it well" seem to seep in through the pores as you read and work through this book.
It presents a number of projects starting with a word count program and progressing through some filters to some fairly complex tasks culminating in a RatFor pre-processor ... Read More
Rating:  -
My hopes were high because of the good reviews this book had received... I was disappointed. The idea of many simple programs, each with some clear functionality, that can be combined to produce powerful commands is illustrated clearly enough in the book. But the readability of the code leaves something to be desired. There are lots of if-the-else, while, and repeat constructs, and it's not possible to understand the code without the verbose explanations from the text. Often checking program behaviour for special cases, such as an empty file on input, are not part of the normal text, but left as excercises to the reader.
I would have liked concise comments that state invariants, pre-conditions, and post-conditions to illustrate the correctness of the program. These comments should be part of the program code, not some separate prose that is disconnected from the code. All too often have I had to support code without these comments, and without the accompanying prose to describe ... Read More
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