Guys this is my first rvu on any book at ms. Hope it goes well..
First of all this isn?t an rvu on any novel or story book. It?s an rvu on a computer book on language ?C?. I didn?t find any separate section on computer books but the author?s name is listed so I'm writin under his title.
Title: Programming in Ansi C.
Edition: Third Edition.
Author: E.Balagurusamy (Vice Chancellor-Anna University-Chennai)
Publisher: Tata McGraw Hill.
Price: Rs.175/-
Level: Beginner to intermediate.
This is the third edition of this popular book and I must say it has now got an international look to it. The cover page consists of Yellow, Black colors with images in Grey and written in big words is ?Programming in C?. The books consists of about 500 pages, is written in Blue ink and deals with almost all the aspects of C language.
Some of the improvements the book has undergone are:
=>A new dialogue box ?Just remember? has been added which is like summary of topics taught in the chapter.
=>Pointers have been explained easily.
=>No of solved examples have been increased (Book says 66% more exercises compared to its previous edition).
Since this is a programming language book there is no story line or something like that so I m briefly stating the chapters and aspects of C covered by this book.
Chapter 1: Overview of C
This chapter basically deals with the evolution of C, the changes it underwent before it was standardized. Then the author shows what a C program consists of, how to write a simple C program, how to execute it.
Now one thing which I found in this book is the author has used loops and decision making statements right from the first chapter. Now assuming that the user of this book has no prior knowledge of programming (a newbie to programming) he/she would find it difficult to understand this examples right from the first chapter itself. So I felt that there shouldn?t have been usage of loops rite from the first chapter as they are taught in the later chapters.
Chapter 2: Constants, Variables and Data Types
This chapter familiarizes the user with the character set of C, why are the data types important in programming, what are constants, variables and different data types how to declare them, what are the things that have to be kept in mind while declaring them, common declaration errors and some simple programs and solved examples as Case Studies.. I must say that the fundamentals are explained very neatly and no problems can occur while understanding.
Chapter 3: Operators and Expressions
This chapter introduces and teaches various types of operators present in C language, their precedence, under what conditions they can be used, type conversions, Operator precedence and mathematical functions present in C language. All these are explained by examples so its much easy to learn them.
Chapter 4: Managing I/O operations
This chapter deals with dealing with Input, Output operations. It deals with how to read and write a character, how to declare it, formatting of data (Input and Output) followed by revision of programming concepts.
Chapter 5: Decision Making & Branching
Now the main C language begins. This chapter deals with different types of decision making statements like If, If-else, Nested If-Else, Else-If ladder, Switch statement, the ternary operator and the goto statement. Each of the statements are explained with solved examples under different conditions so it teaches us what kind of decision making statement to be used under what condition. And to increase our practice there are a host of practice exercises which make us proficient in these.
Chapter 6: Decision Making & Looping
The chapter introduces looping statements: While, do, do-while and for. The most important concept in my opinion for any programming language is looping. It is explained well here but here I felt the author moves too fast in explaining loops. Although the ?goto? statement has been explained extremely easily but I felt that some more explanations would have more easier for the user to understand.
Chapter 7: Arrays
Arrays?group of variables of same type. This chapter deals completely with Arrays. Starting from one-dimensional arrays it goes up to teaching dynamic arrays. Explanations include declarations and Initialization of One-dimensional arrays, two-dimensional arrays, multi-dimensional arrays and examples following this explanation.
Chapter 8: Character Arrays & Strings
This chapter covers the aspects of Strings?Declaration & Initialization, reading a string from the user, writing strings to the terminal, various operations in strings, string handling functions and other features of strings.
Chapter 9: User Defined Functions
This chapter deals with functions: Introduction, elements of functions, function definition, return values and types, function calls, different categories of functions (with explanations), nesting of functions, passing datatypes to functions, scope, visibility and life-time of variables.
Chapter 10: Structures and Unions
This chapter deals with Structures: Definition, Declaration of structure variables, Initialization, Arrays of/within structures, structures and functions and unions.
Chapter 11: Pointers
This chapter deals with pointers (probably the toughest thing to learn in C). It starts with understanding pointers, declaration of pointers, accessing variables through pointers, chain of pointers, pointer expressions, pointer increments, pointers with arrays, strings, array of pointers and pointers with functions and also pointers with structures.
Chapter 12: File Management
Concepts of opening, closing files, I/O operations on files, Error handling of files and random access are taught in this chapter. This is a small chapter.
Chapter 13: Dynamic Memory Allocation
Dynamic Memory Allocation-Basic operations, concepts of linked lists, types of linked lists, creation, insertion and deletion of data item and some applications are explained in this chapter.
Chapter 14: The Preprocessor
Here the macro substitution, including files and various directives are introduced.
Chapter 15: Developing a C program
This is the final chapter of this book & basically deals with various guidelines while developing a C program. It shows various stages of program development with common errors occurring while coding how to rectify those errors, things to be kept in mind while programming etc. are all taught in this chapter.
After this some 3 appendixes are given which lists various header files, library functions, ASCII values of characters and Bit operations.
Finally a phone book program is given with complete coding as an application.
CONCLUSION: it is really a good book for beginners (like me) who want to have thorough understanding of C language. But I must say that this is not the book for those who want to do advanced programming in C because after chapter 11 the advanced concepts have been explained briefly and so definitely some other book is to be referred for advanced programming concepts like files, link lists, etc,. Moreover there not at a reference of Graphics in C in this book.
P.S:Please do comment on my rvu whether u liked it or not!!
