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As you may know, I'm now studying computer science.
I'm now taking a course called Introduction to System Programming, which delves deep into C concepts, and gives very solid C++ knowledge.
When beginning the course, I started watching the video recorded lectures by our legendary professor, and in the very first lesson he complained about programming books - those written in hebrew, and a large part of those written in English. In fact his old site contains critique of all popular programming books sold in Israel. He said that given the chance we should throw them away.
I was quite surprised, given that I have collected 4-5 various books about C/C++ which I skimmed through during high school, and I judged them basically by readability and clarity of explanations.
Just before beginning a large C++ project, I decided to revisit my favorite C++ book, and I was disgusted to find out that I found both factual errors and horrible horrible programming style.
It's unbelievable I once relied on it. After skimming through it, I threw it out to the trash. And to think thousands of people rely on this crap to teach them programming.
Another book which I used to not like, was actually quite reliable and factually correct, and contained good programming practice advice, though it never had enough space to properly justify the recommendations and give practical examples of how things could go wrong.
I'll go over the rest of my books tomorrow.
I'm also quite enjoying the assembly course (Computer Organization and Programming) although it deals with simpler PDP-11 code.
I'm now taking a course called Introduction to System Programming, which delves deep into C concepts, and gives very solid C++ knowledge.
When beginning the course, I started watching the video recorded lectures by our legendary professor, and in the very first lesson he complained about programming books - those written in hebrew, and a large part of those written in English. In fact his old site contains critique of all popular programming books sold in Israel. He said that given the chance we should throw them away.
I was quite surprised, given that I have collected 4-5 various books about C/C++ which I skimmed through during high school, and I judged them basically by readability and clarity of explanations.
Just before beginning a large C++ project, I decided to revisit my favorite C++ book, and I was disgusted to find out that I found both factual errors and horrible horrible programming style.
It's unbelievable I once relied on it. After skimming through it, I threw it out to the trash. And to think thousands of people rely on this crap to teach them programming.
Another book which I used to not like, was actually quite reliable and factually correct, and contained good programming practice advice, though it never had enough space to properly justify the recommendations and give practical examples of how things could go wrong.
I'll go over the rest of my books tomorrow.
I'm also quite enjoying the assembly course (Computer Organization and Programming) although it deals with simpler PDP-11 code.
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