C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software

by David R. Hanson

Book Overview

Every programmer and software project manager must master the art of creating reusable software modules; they are the building blocks of large, reliable applications. Unlike some modern object-oriented languages, C provides little linguistic support or motivation for creating reusable application programming interfaces (APIs). While most C programmers use APIs and the libraries that implement them in almost every application they write, relatively...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201498413
• ISBN13: 9780201498417
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

helped me avoid using C++

I had been working with Java for 10 years until I realized I was bored out of my mind. I decided to build my next big thing in C. I wasn't sure anymore how to sanely build a large application without the code organizing properties and safety of an OO lang and I refuse to use C++ so I was stuck until reading this.

Excellent, useful, timeless

I second the many positive reviews about this book. If you architect and/or make software for a living, this book will give you a life long of useful ideas and provide with real running and working generic solutions. Foremost I was personally stunned by the implementation of the exception handler emulator, which I adopted ever since. Now I can look back at it's respectable 12 years of service with exemplary low "bug rate" and hundreds of millions in revenue gathered from products using this style of coding. One issue was not mentioned by the most of other reviewers: This book is one of the now rare examples of "Literate Programming," a term coined by Donald Knuth, who implemented the "web system" with two programs Tangle and Weave. From the same source the one program generates code for a compiler, the other generates a book text for a text processing system. This way code and the literature about it are in perfect sync. Most importantly, the code showed in the book is a real tested and running implementation, not a mere pseudo code used by others so often, which may or may not be correct. See section 1.1 for a description of the system and typographical convention used by Prof. Hanson in his book. For me this book is a classic. Timeless, even now 12 years since its date of release it is highly recommended for every practitioner at any level.

By far the most advanced C book I read

I have been a C and C++ programmer for 5 years, and is regarded as an professional C and C++ programmer. After scanning this book, I think I should re-estimate my C skill.In one word, this book is the most advanced C book I've read, it presents lots of wonderful techniques and ideas, and more, all the things are very useful. For examples:* Use standard C's setjmp/longjmp to implement WIn32 SEH-like exception handling machanism.* Very detailed and smart memory management solution.* All the data structures and utilities in well-defined, reusable format: atoms, tables, sets, vectors(dynamic arrays), rings, strings, arithmetric with any precisions, thread library... everything you need to build a whole new system.I'd say that once you master each of those things (this means read and re-read until understanding occur, as Fransis Glassborow said ), you will be an outstanding programmer in any circumstance, and can be full of confidence to accept any programming challenge.The only thing I complain is about the source code. The source code presenting style in this book is relative strange and difficult to catch. I tried to type the code into my PC, and found it's a unpleasent work. Fortunately, the all source can be download from the book's web page, so, I still gave 5 stars.

From novice to a professional

If you want to become a professional programmer overnight.read and thoroughly understand this book. If one could master the techniques described in this book..he may never have to worry about failing software developer's job interviews. This last statement is based on my personal experience. The chapters provide source code which is clear, efficient, and outrightly professional, the description is concise, to the point and clear enough.Most of the code in the book can be used without any modification. I don't know of a book in the market that could teach how to design and implement a user-level threads library from the scratch WITHOUT any help from the Operating System. Simply wonderful

Probably the best advanced C book in existance...

Clearly written and well organized, this book presents more than 20 _highly_ useful library interfaces for containers, string management, mathematics, and memory management. There isn't a line of code in the whole book that you couldn't take and use, verbatim, in a project today --- after reading this book, you'll probably never have a compelling reason to write a string library or a hash table interface again.More importantly, though, each example library illustrates ways to effectively design consistant and useable library interfaces, from generic ADTs to system service wrappers. After reading this book, you'll not only have an arsenal of useful code to leverage, but also a good understanding of how to design clean, modular, reuseable components for your application.Hanson's C code is extremely clear and concise. Even if you've been programming professionally for a long time, you are likely to pick up a useful technique or two just by reading the source code in the book. If you're not very experienced, you will learn about C programming idioms that will be valuable to you in future work.I really like how this book, and Hanson's other book ("A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation") are put together. Hanson employs Literate Programming techniques to weave the code he's discussing together with his discussion. This makes it very simple to track what portions of the code are being talked about at any pointin the book.