🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <985@mcdchg.UUCP> kjepo@portofix.liu.se (Kjell Post) writes:
>In article <888@mcdchg.UUCP>, oliveb!miriam@ames.arpa (Miriam Eldridge) writes:
>> supply to his customers:  one for the new user, one for the somewhat
>> more sophisticated user (I put Russ Sage's TRICKS OF THE UNIX MASTERS
>> in this category), and one for the programmer.
>Aaaah, REVENGE!
>1. Don't buy "Tricks of the UNIX masters"!!!
>   It's practically worthless, written by someone who obviously wanted
>   to make just a few, fast bucks. It's not in the UNIX spirit at all and
>   it just makes me mad when I see all the stupid examples. Instead, ...
>
>2. Marc Rochkind "Advanced UNIX programming" is great!
>
>3. Kernighan, Pike "The UNIX programming environment".
>				-- Kjell Post


THough I haven't read "Tricks of the UNIX Masters", I have an idea of
what it's about.  We've all seen books of this type where the author
tries to put a few gimmicks in and sell the book.  I think a good
UNIX book should try to explain the philosophy of UNIX and the function.
Both selections #2 and #3 do just that (#2 being much lower-level).

While I'm on the subject.... When I first started programming in
C some while back, I bought a book called "The C Programmer's Library"
by Jack Purdum.  It seemed pretty good, and the only thing I could
complain about was the style, etc. But later, I needed to write some
routines that dealt with binary trees in C.  I'd done this before
in Pascal (yuk!) but I forgot.  To refresh myself, I consulted Purdum's
book (which had a little about trees in it).  Whoa!  He left out the
most complicated part: that of deleting nodes.  

No doubt as a excercise to the user.  When I'm taking a class I want
to do excercises.  When I'm doing a job, I want to see example code.
What I'm getting at is that he showed how to build a tree, and how
to traverse a tree (in 3 ways, even) but left out the part that really
is worth a damn (idiots can figure out how to add and traverse).  
Boy, cop-out's like that just make me mad!

MikeP

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The company and all my associates and friends and ESPECIALLY the 
government put me up to say all this useless trash.
MikeP    {seismo|sdcrdcf}!ism780c!mikep "Some of my best friends are Bigots..."