Programming Books

This book uses Smalltalk to teach the basics of object oriented programming on Mac or PC. Before getting my hands on this book I have to say I was having trouble grasping the basics.

I personally bought the book as I want to learn Smalltalk. For some reason the "with Robots" in the title had me skip over this book for almost a year. Most, if not all the other Smalltalk books I got, although great, usually assume differing levels of pre-existing programming knowledge and experience and approach the teaching of Smalltalk skimming over the stuff that is a required foundation to *understand* it. Stephane Ducasse does an excellent job of explaining that missing foundational stuff. And he does it without getting too deep into Smalltalk or Squeak itself.

As others have pointed out this book is not really focussed on teaching Smalltalk - Smalltalk is the tool used to teach basic O-O programming. However, he's done an excellent job of doing both!!!

Having finished this book I'm writing basic programs - and finally understanding better the programs of others.

The use of an Integrated Development Environment [IDE] for a user to learn a language in, and to then program within, is well known. Microsoft has made powerful IDEs for its languages. And the open source Eclipse can be used for Java. Along these lines, Ducasse offers his book. It teaches Smalltalk using the Squeak IDE.

The twist is that Squeak uses the visual metaphors of robots and robot factory, to convey the crucial concepts of objects/classes. As Ducasse explains, Squeak can be directed at an audience that is perhaps of high school age or even younger. So a clear visual feedback between example code and what the student sees then happen is vital, given her limited background and possibly limited attention span.

Squeak uses Smalltalk in part because that is a very minimalist language. If you come from C++, Java or C#, you may be struck by its simplicity, compared to the oodles of classes and notational intricacies of those languages. Which of course also makes it easier for a young student to learn Smalltalk or Squeak itself.

I wonder a little about the book itself, though. A motivated high school student could easily use it. But for some younger students? In that situation, it may well be that the book could be best directed at a teacher, who can then instruct from it.

I whole-heartedly recommend this book for introducing the novice to the nature of computing. I am giving a copy to my 14 year old grandson to introduce him to the fascinating world of programming. He lives 500 km away from me, so he will largely be on his own. I do not expect this to be a problem because the book is perfect for self study.

I want my grandson to learn the essence of computing without spending time on things that he will have to unlearn later or that prove to be blind alleys on his road to computer proficiency . This book is ideal for this purpose. It will let him experience the basic notions of computing in carefully graded steps. Each step tells him how to do fun experiments in the provided environment where he directs a robot/turtle to draw interesting patterns on the screen. The 22 steps take him from a simple sequence of commands to the creation of elaborate simulations; ending at the point where my grandson should start creating his own classes and subclasses.

The experiments are all done in Squeak, a dialect of Smalltalk. It could be argued that my grandson had better learn Java or some other mainstream language. I believe Smalltalk is a better choice because it is simpler, cleaner, and more immediate. The basic concepts are universal and my grandson can easily switch to some other language after he has mastered the fundamentals.

The book is written in a fluent, idiomatic English. It is written in the first person; the writer speaks directly to the reader. This writing style combined with the examples being concrete makes for the smooth communication of what are really abstract ideas.

Anybody wanting to understand more than e-mail and text processing could not do better than to install the free robotic environment on their computer and work through the book’s text and examples.

I've used this book and the BotsInc environment to show my 12-yr old daughter how much fun writing software can be and it's been a wild success!

In fact, it all fits together so well that I'm planning to use it as the basis of an introductory series of classes on software writing as craftwork, to be offered through a local craft organization.

Help train the next generation of software writers! Buy this book!

This book actually teaching computer programming, rather than teaching a computer programming language. It has to use something, and Smalltalk (Squeak) is gentle enough that it doesn't get in the way of the topic.

Stéphane Ducasse, a prolific writer about object-oriented programming, says in his preface: "The material for this book was originally developed by my wife, who is a physics and mathematics teacher in a French school where the students are between eleven and fifteen years old". Indeed, the pains taken to make object-oriented programming understandable to someone with no background are quite apparent, and they certainly pay off. The author has more than met his goal "to teach you object-oriented programming, because this paradigm provides an excellent metaphor for teaching programming".

Instead of teaching Smalltalk, the computer language he uses, he's actually teaching programming. Smalltalk, originally designed as a teaching language, has minimal syntatic issues and it very simple once the student knows a few basic rules. The reader of this book doesn't have to know much to start workign though, since the author distributes a working Squeak environment that's ready to use. He's already provided a "Bot factory" and a working (virtual) robot to which the reader can send commands, much like the LOGO language and its turtle. Without getting caught in the details of object or class design, the readers start out simply by interacting with objects and sending them messages to control their behavior.

As the reader learns more about what the robot knows how to do, the author devises trickier problems for the reader to solve. These usually involve causing the robot to move in such a way as to draw out a pattern. In doing so, the reader is actually writing programs that control the robots behavior to accomplish the goal. Although the language is really SmallTalk, the author effectively hides most of that through the use of the robot's little language.

The Squeak environment the author distributes is easy to use for anyone with a basic idea of computers (i.e. mouse and keyboard, click here, and so on). It's easy to install because you only need to download it and click on the file. From there, you see the Squeak environment and a ready-to-use robot. Move the mouse near the robot and a speech bubble with a blinking cursor appears. Type a command and the robot responds. Easy peasy.

If you are already a computer programmer, or have some experience with computer programming and want to learn Smalltalk, this book is probably too basic for you. However, if you go to the authors web page (Amazon tends to edit links from reviews, so google the author's name) you'll find links to many free Smalltalk books that you can download as PDFs.

then get this one. I learned enough about the reasons for using it and also how to configure it to authenticate against an LDAP server.

Well worth getting and keeping on your shelf.

Squid: The Definitive Guide by Duane Wessels is a great book for someone with aspirations of setting up and getting the most out of Squid. It is lengthy at just over 400 pages, but that is to be expected and desired in O'Reilly's "The Definitive Guide" series. One point worth mentioning is that Duane Wessels (the author, for those with short synaptic cycles) is the one who started Squid and still works on it today. Each chapter builds nicely on subsequent chapters, so there isn't any skipping around. If you're just looking to set it and forget it, this book is probably not for you. Otherwise, read on.

The first three chapters are pretty basic: history of Squid, downloading then installing. For those with no concern of going through downloading and installing, there is a nice section describing each configure switch and, while weighing in at a healthy 48 options, it may be helpful to have this as a reference.

Chapter Four, Configuration Guide For the Eager, is an often desired, but often left out chapter in technical books. By just reading chapters one through four, it is possible to have a fully functional setup of Squid, albeit not very secure or ready for the pounding of the masses. You will, however, begin to understand how Squid operates. This chapter discusses the most often used settings, such as: minimum/maximum size of cached objects, log files and ACLs to restrict addresses, etc.

Chapter Five, Running Squid, covers what you expect. It includes such topics as, boot scripts, chrooting and rotating log files. Again, basic stuff, but necessary for the sake of completeness.

Chapter Six, All About Access Controls, covers one of Squid's major powers and attractions, access controls. ACLs give the administrator extremely fine-grained tuning. Some of the choice highlights for limiting access to addresses/domains include, but not limited to: filter by subnet, MAC, IP address or administrator assigned group. Furthermore, regular expressions can be used to filter URLs or URIs. A most likely seldom used, but very cool, feature is the ability to filter by BGP AS (Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System) numbers. HTTP request methods such as POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. can also be filtered. Filtering by time or restricting access by user name is also supported. Each topic is assiduously explained and leaves little to be desired.

Chapters Seven and Eight cover disk caching with chapter Seven being basic material and then Eight covering more advanced topics. Discussions on object pruning, size limits, cache replacement policies and many other cache optimizations are covered in these chapters and are necessary to thoroughly understand if you are situated in a relatively large environment or just want to squeeze every bit of performance from your Squid.

Chapter Nine, Interception Caching, covers transparent proxying. This chapter discusses the benefits (no need to configure clients) and drawbacks (cannot do user authentication) of implementing such a system. It then goes on to discuss how to configure Alteon/Nortel, Foundry, Extreme Networks, Arrowpoint, iptables, pf and ipfw to perform the routing to the Squid box.

Chapter ten, Talking to other Squids

Scalability is another favorable attribute of Squid. Running in parallel with previous chapters, this chapter details the advantages (load balancing and increasing your cache hits) and the disadvantages (security problems with having to trust neighboring Squids) of a caching hierarchy. In addition, it explains how to configure connect timeouts and other tweaks to keep Squids aware of when their siblings are down.

Chapter eleven, Redirectors, covers another great attribute of Squid. Redirectors can be used, among other possibilities, to remove advertisements in web pages or rewrite client requests based on their given URL or URI. This chapter details how they work, from a protocol level, and provides example configuration settings such as sending only specific users through the redirector or conversely, letting specific users bypass the redirector altogether.

Squid can be configured to use various user authentication methods to allow or deny access. Chapter Twelve, Authentication Helpers, covers these options. Squid can talk HTTP Basic, HTTP Digest and NTLM. Each type is well explained in how it works and detailed in how to setup.

Chapter Thirteen and Fourteen fully explain logging and monitoring. The logging chapter explains the type of information each log file catches, a full description of each error or information type (which is a great reference that I made full use of) and configuration directives that change what is logged or how it is logged. Monitoring Squid covers the Squid Cache Manger (A web front-end to many great statistics), a brief mention of using Squid-RRD and using SNMP. Such monitoring statistics include, file descriptor allocation, byte hit ratios, cache hits and cache misses and a wealth of other useful information.

Chapter Fifteen, Server Accelerator Mode, explains Server Accelerator Mode, which is also known as Surrogate Mode. It is a neat trick where Squid stills runs as a proxy, however, the Squid server is proxying the world (or a select few) to your server. One obvious advantage includes performance (or Slashdot hardening if you will). There are several config directives explained here as well as some gotchas.

Chapter Sixteen, Debugging, is the is one of the few chapters that I did not need to reference. Although, if you need to, there is some good information provided.

Appendix A comes with a config file reference that actually provides more information then the comments in the configuration file (Holy moley!...they better trademark that idea before other authors catch on!).

Appendix B briefly covers memory caching and optimization.

Appendix C shows how to use delay pools to limit user bandwidth.

Appendix D details file system performance benchmarks to show you filesystem and operating system differences.

Appendix E discusses running Squid on Windows using Cygwin.

Appendix F covers auto configuration of Squid clients to avoid needing to physically visit the many machines you administer.

In conclusion:

Pros: This is "The Book" for Squid. No skipping from chapter to chapter, the author was also the designer and still one of the maintainers, fuller descriptions of the configuration file directives that the configuration file comments. It is a great reference.

Cons: Really the only thing that I didn't like was that he only discussed HTTP proxying. There is a brief mention of FTP and SMTP, but only a couple of sentences. To be fair, in the preface he did mention that he would would of liked to written on these topics but didn't have time.

For the new comer I recommend to buy this book if your finding an alternative for Microsoft box like ISA or MSProxy 2.0.

Squid is robost and a very stable Proxy Server, you can use it even in Entreprise consumption..trust me I use it since 2001.

If your looking for technical books or documents about Squid, this is the one your looking for...

Back in 1998 when I was running my own ISP, Squid was a lifesaver because it allowed me to provide excellent web response to customers over a very modest upstream connection.

When I moved on to consulting Squid was the answer to a wide variety of client problems from employee Internet access control (Redirectors) to company website performance (Server Accelerator Mode) to plain old web page load times (Proxy Cache).

Now that I've moved in-house in a large corporation (30,000+ employees) and I've found out what commercial vendors are charging for their solutions to each of these problems, I have gladly used my knowledge of Squid to save us money.

Of course, that knowledge was not easily won, at least not for me. Because Squid was an open source project there was a lot of information available on the Web, but, of course, because Squid was an open source project, it was hard to find a definitive answer to my particular problem without asking a lot of dumb questions on newsgroups or making a lot of trial and error attempts tweaking compile time options, system changes and configuration file settings.

I have waited for this book for a long time.

I was concerned that it might be too detailed to be readable. Thankfully, Duane Wessels, the primary architect of Squid , has laid out this book to provide simple access at the Macro level. The chapter arrangement and organization are very intuitive. And yet the book still contains enough information to satisfy almost every question.

The one caveat I would make to a reader is to maintain situational awareness while delving into a chapter because, without noticing it, you can suddenly be confronted with pages and pages of configuration file details. There's no avoiding it, when a book says `Definitive Guide' on the cover you expect to have full coverage. It's just that the book is so lucidly written that the transition from high-level discussions to detailed facts might catch you un-aware.

And, really, it's that kind of feeling that lets you know that you're reading a very valuable text. I spent the first hour after I got this book skimming each chapter, happy at each additional topic I discovered. Then I went back and asked it the two hardest questions I have faced using Squid over the past year, in each case the answer was easily found and fully explained (Mr. Wessels deserves an award for making transparent proxying understandable).

The wait for this book was well worth it. I highly recommend it to any person working with, or thinking about working with, Squid.

This guide will pay for itself many times over. If you are considering a caching server for home, office or business you need this book.

My previous experience with proxies was MS proxy server 2.0 and I was a little apprehensive of this project; not to worry. Forty six pages into the book, squid was running; total time invested including installation of the program was about 2 hrs.

Another two hours of reading and precious few changes to config files and my log files are rotating, all ports I need exposed are open and the rest are hidden. I have already been able to tune squid to accelerate delivery of content using *only* this book as a guide. I haven't even had to look at the online documentation for squid (the first time I ever recall that happening).

Not only is my internet connection now available to all users, but also every one is browsing faster than they were before on single dedicated dial ups.

I can't say enough good things about the book or the program. In 14 years of networking I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. This is one of those rare guides whose author is extremely knowlegable and the material presentation is flawless. I have a large computer science library and in my experience, it doesn't get any better than this.

Bravo Mr. Wessels!

I stumbled upon this book at a CompUSA and have found it to be one of the the best basic but thorough overviews of OS X 10.2.x. I needed a book to give my users new to OS X. I wanted something to help them get used to the new inteface and features but I didn't want them overwhelmed by too much detail. This book fit perfectly. It uses text and illustrations very well and describes things clearly. Everyone who has used this book has gotten up to speed quickly and with little help from me. That's success!

I bought my 'new', used ibook on ebay and so have no manual. The guy was nice enough to send it with Jaguar installed though, so I popped over to amazon, and bought this little guide. I am up and running, with an updated ISP, browser (safari, free at apple), and cooking along with icons making sense and configurations configured, ALL because of this little book! Now I know I have to get one of those big heavy books for the Big Stuff, but I am good to go in the meantime.

I am a recent convert from the 'PC' world to the MAC world. I was looking for a book to get me into the MAC quickly and easily. I am very computer literate on the 'PC' but needed the translation into the Apple world. A friend of mine has praised Greg Simsic's books on Photoshop, so I knew this would probably be a good book to consider. I have been very happy with it. It is concise and clear and seems to point out all the things I need to know to become comfortable with the MAC. It is slim enough I can keep it in the bag with my G4 laptop-always ready for quick reference. There is a very thorough index and table of contents to get you to what you need to know. And the information is clear and to the point. It seems to cover all of the basic information for me to get around the OSX system and its applications. I cannot believe the reasonable price on this book. I don't think I have ever bought a computer book [this price]. What a bargain this book is ...

I've been using Mac computers for more than a decade, but I have to confess my first bootup of OSX was a jarring experience. Where'd my control panels go? What's the dock? Where are my files? For the first time ever, I decided to go out and buy a guidebook to a Macintosh product.

Which brought me to this guide to OS X Jaguar conducted by friendly natives Greg Simsic and Katy Bodenmiller. The entire Simsic/Bodenmiller series is a tonic for anyone who resents the condescension of that "For Dummies" series and its ilk; rather than treating its reader like a slow third-grader, Simsic and Bodenmiller get down to business without all the superciliousness that keeps all self-respecting Mac users far away from those little black and yellow Cliff-Note's-like books. At last, a software guide I don't have to be embarrassed to read in public.

With its learned, front-porch and down-home idiom, Start! takes the reader from startup to moviemaking with savvy tips for everything in between. The layout of the book is as clean, logical, and as easy to navigate as OSX itself. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this book is that Simsic and Bodenmiller are able to address two very different audiences-the die-hard Mac devotee just making the switch from OS9, as well as the newly PC-cured-without wasting the time of either. If Jaguar makes you pine for nine, get this book. You'll never look back.

Greg Simsic and Katy Bodenmiller have written the PERFECT beginner's guide to Mac OSX. I teach OSX classes to new Macintosh users (univ. faculty) and I've gone thru lots of OSX books and materials. This is by far the best I've seen. Simple, straightforward, immediately to-the-point. It's written with a clarity and understanding of new users that is hard to find in many of the intro-level books. Greg's books have always been among my favorites, and this ranks with the best.

Trying to learn useful things about XML can be hard. XML is so flexible and can be used for so many things, descriptions of it have a bad tendency to be vague, never touching the real world. Or they are too detailed and technical to easily understand. This book has a really nice balance of these factors. For example, if you want to know what a web service is, and want to see an actual example of one without an overwhelming amount of technical detail, this book is a good place to look. You can see the code and what's actually needed to implement it.

As a strategic decision maker in the software development industry, transitioning into XML based technologies is at the top of my priority list. Strategic XML provides a very good introductory through advanced study of the topic. The author not only educates the reader from an academic perspective, but goes in depth with real world examples. He actually goes one step further and points the reader toward suitable tools and development platforms. For anybody moving into (or already in the midst of) joining the XML world, I would highly recommend giving Strategic XML a read.

I love this book, it's not your average learn to build a CD or Book database in XML. If you want to learn the XML, buy a generic fat red book with the lots of faces on it, if you want to learn how to apply the XML to practical situations, get this one. It's not going to take you years to read and the selection of applicable quotes at the start of each make it quite amusing and exciting. Add a bit of method to your madness, buy this book and apply a Software Engineer's approach to your data modelling.

I really liked this book. It gave me some very good insight into how to use the XML I have been learning for the past 2 years. It is not filled with a lot of useless rehash of XML primer material, it has a real nice review/overview of the technology and then focuses on the real issue of how to use it to solve business problems. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who doesn't need a 600 page regurgitation of XML basics, but instead is focused on solving problems with an exciting technology!

I initially read this book because I know the author and I promised him I would. I'm not a programmer but I am responsible for the technical direction of my company. Suprisingly, the book was written in plain enough English to give me a good general understanding of how to use XML, SOAP, Web Services etc. I'm passing it on to my programming department as a primer to start getting us up speed on these technologies.

This book is excellent. It is very thorough and easy to understand. There is sample code in every chapter so the concepts are very clear.

I have been using subfiles in RPGIV for many years - this book taught me some new tricks I wasn't aware of!

This is THE subfile book for AS/400 RPG programmers.

Mr. Vandever approaches the subject with a sense of humor, lots of examples, and excellent technique. The examples are written in ILE RPG IV (RPG III programmers will find the book useful, as well), and do a nice job of showing off recent RPG IV enhancements by incorporating them in the examples.

I have developed lots of subfile programs, and read the other books on the subject. This is by far the best treatment of the subject that I have seen.

As a programmer new to RPG 4 and programming for the AS/400, I needed help with subfiles. This book proved easy to read (I can't say I've read it through, but enough to get what I needed) and there are lots of helpful code examples. I used the sample program for a page-at-time subfile application almost verbatim to get started on one of my programs, which saved a considerable amount of time and effort. Overall this book has been quite useful for me.

Book really explains subfiles in terms anyone can understand. The CD/ROM has sample code that you can use immediately as "models" to develop your own programs. Author does an excellent job of explaining how subfiles work. But if you are like me, you will develop several subfile "skeleton" programs for your own future use. That's where the examples can really help...

This book has a great knowledge of all things computer related, DOS, WIndows, Hardware, and more.

It is an awesome resource for all people who work with computers. It has great DOS, Windows and hardware information, and more. It is like a bible to me.

While this is a very good reference, it leaves a lot of room for disappointment. Perhaps its time to replace the resistor color code tables with summaries of the IEEE and ITU standards, certainly something more needed in the 2001 world of PCs. When was the last time anyone changed a resistor in a PC other than at the component manufacturer site? And it doesn't yet contain a power supply wire color code, which would be far more useful than resistor codes. There is info on Win98 but not on Win2K or ME (or even NT). The processor and socket list is hopelessly out of date. Fixed disk drive lists are way behind the times with only the most minimal information to help keep the confusing IDE/SCSI/EIDE PIO 1/2/3/4/5 ATA33/66/100/133 drive, BIOS, MB chipset and cable standards straight.
This is a good book for troubleshooting, repairing and maintaining the older PC, but it is not even treading water well in a world of P4 or Thunderbird processors, multi-gigabyte drives or 400Mhz RIMM memory. Still, I have to give it four stars (would be 4.5 if Amazon allowed) because there simply is nothing better out there except keeping file folders full of manufacturer specs, white papers and web page printouts.

I am a 14 year old and have usued this book to help me build everything from forts to computers, it's GREAT and I would recommend it to everyone!

When I first open this book I thought I was looking at an larger copy of the Pocket PCREF, after reading through it I found that while most of the information included is exactly like the Pocket version there is was more information included.

Large in size and over 875 pages, this reference book includes everything in the Pocket PCREF plus a very extensive glossary, printer control codes and a much larger pc phone directory. Overall a much better value that the Pocket PCREF book.

The material covered is broken down into categories and each category is covered well. The authors take a great deal of time in making sure the information presented is accurate and well documented. For the money this might be the one to have on your desk.

While this book won't fit in your back pocket, it will fit very nicely in a briefcase. An excellent value for the dollar. You might find similar books on the market, but you'll be hard pressed to find any one better. Well Done Sequoia Publishing.

This is a well written book, code is easy to download, and a number of topics. All in all though, the writing is clear and easily understood so it's well worth the money...

I am a Java web/search programmer who wanted to "get into" text mining. I found this book an excellent resource for this. Text Mining is a field in which active research is still going on, and other Text Mining books I have looked at reflect this - the authors expect you to have a certain degree of mathematical background to understand what they are saying. This book explains briefly the math behind each of the approaches, but it focuses more on the algorithms that result from the math, so it is easier to read.

Of course, a side effect of this is that the approaches described are not necessarily the state of the art for solving any given problem, but once you get the basic approach to solving a problem, it is relatively easy to find and understand the documentation on the web for the more advanced approaches, since you now know what you are looking for and how it differs from your basic solution.

The book does have a (fairly long) chapter where it covers the math background necessary to get started with Text Mining. If you understand the stuff in there, you will actually be able to think up solutions to text mining problems that are unique to your own situation.

The algorithms in the book are in pseudo-code, but the book comes with a CD (or download from the author's sourceforge project textmine.sf.net) where you can see working Perl code.

Overall, I think this is one of the most useful books that I have purchased in a while. It should appeal most to programmer types who have programmed in their language(s) of choice for a while in areas other than text mining, wants to get into text mining, and doesn't want to spend a lot of time relearning high school and college math before starting off.

Text mining is one of the most exciting subjects of the web, and too few books are dealing with it. This one is one of them, and it gives quite a few examples of text mining applications, like spam filters or search engine ranking algorithms. The style is easy to follow, and the concepts easy to understand given some maths background.

However, I expected more details, and a richer content overall, thus the four stars. This is still a good book.

Software developers learn how to mine information on the Web and turn it into valuable data; but developers need to understand how data mining works. For a programmer's application-oriented review, Text Mining Application Programming is the item of choice: it reviews text data, how it's found, and how search engines locate and gather it. Next, it teaches how to build spiders to crawl the Web, how to use the information, and how to monitoring it. Perl developers will find its Perl-based code useful, but it's not necessary to know Perl to run the software herein. An excellent guide to mining the Net.

There is an old expression that half of knowing anything is knowing where to find it. And there is little more frustrating to be looking at 'My Computer' trying to find what you know you have stored in a file somewhere. Well, perhaps just as frustrating is to go to one of the search engines and try to find something that you know is there but just don't know the proper words to find it.

In this book Dr. Konchady talks about how to go find data that is in text form on your system, on your network or out on the web somewhere. It talks about search engines, but also about other techniques that can be used only by programming.

The CD that comes with the book contains several Perl software snippets that help to find named entities, parts of speech, phrases and gives a summary of text documents. This area includes developing web crawlers that can be adapted by individual users to go out and find specialized information. It further contains an Open Source software package called Text Mine that is designed for mining operations. In addition it has utilities to build and enhance Text Mine and utilities to build and manage MySQL database tables. This is an excellent book on everything from the basic hints and types through some of the mathematics that underlies text mining.

His section on the nature of an English language Question and Answer system is the best I've ever seen.

This is the second book on Forth that should be read by any person interested in learning Forth. After finishing the examples in Brodies first book, read this one to pick up on how a Forth programmer solves different programming problems. You will find that the methods learned are applicable to all languages but especially useful in the iterative style that is Forth.

If you program in Forth, this book is mind-opening. I second the reviewer who said you should read this book after reading "Starting Forth".

However, to the reviews along the lines of "You don't use Forth? Doesn't matter": I think this book would be very hard going for someone not familiar with Forth. In fact, it is a bit dated, and there are better, more modern books available on non-Forth design, factoring, etc.

Also note that the copyright holder has made this edition of the book (2004) freely available online. Buying from Amazon saves you from getting square eyes (or using up all your print toner).

FORTH isn't for everyone, the use of Reverse Polish Notation, stack operations, and language extensibility can be daunting. But, between Starting Forth as a tutorial and this work providing conceptual insight, there is a path for self study that can bring you along to intermediate level with a reasonable investment of time. Add the FORTH Programmer's Handbook, the ANSI spec and a freeware FORTH package for your flavor of OS (including PalmOS, UNIX, WINDOWS, MSDOS, just about everything has a version) available via the net, and you've got everything you need to explore and learn this powerful, extensible, and compact language.

Thinking FORTH is as much about philosophy of problem solving and programming style as FORTH. Concepts presented in this '84 publication were light years ahead of their time. OOPs concepts, including data encapsulation, modularity and overloading are explained in simple understandable terms (although with different terminology). Emphisis is on eligance, flexibility and reusability, written in Leo Brodie's unique style. (NO YOU CAN'T HAVE MINE!)

As a teacher/programmer I found this to be a phenomenal piece of work. One of the hottest items in programming today is refactoring - it's here. Object orientation, modularity, top-down, bottom-up, it's all here. You can't read this book without becomming a better programmer regardless of the language. But you don't want to just read it. Work through the examples, follow the logic until you understand it - really understand it. You don't use Forth? Doesn't matter. The principles of problem analysis and good program construction are language independent. Try this one - you'll like it. Learning to function in the sparce yet luxuriant Forth universe will change the way you program.

I picked this book up probably around 11 years ago and it is what I used to learn C programming. I had other books at hand as well, but this one really shines. The book has an obvious DOS slant to it as it is from that pre-Windows era. But in learning C programming, this one is hard to beat. I have since gone on to learn other languages, most notably Pascal / Delphi, but this book will always remain on my shelf. It was incredibly useful.

This is a great book for C programming. It starts from elementary level and ends up teaching you advanced controls and professional aspects. It also covers some part of C++ and object oriented programming.

To be fair, I have the first edition of this book, dated 1987, and called "Turbo C Programming for the IBM". It has been with me many a year and has always been my favorite C book. It is the easiest of my C books to understand, and can be read like a novel with only occasionally going to the computer to try out their programs for reinforcement of a concept. All their examples are complete programs which are very helpful to me. Drawbacks to this book include: a) their sections on "Turbo" C are not applicable anymore, b) there are sections dealing with pc-specific issues that are not useful, and c) the C is not ansi compliant. However, in spite of this, it is still my favorite book because it is easy to understand.

This was my very first C programming book. I had used Pascal a little bit when I bought it. 11 years later my copy of the book is tattered and torn, but I always keep it handy. The book is illustrated very well. It has floating arrows that describe what each element of the source code does. It does not talk down to the audience. The information within is presented with extreme clarity. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn C. I would also recommend this book to anyone wanting to give it as a gift to a teenager.

This book is how I learned to program 'C'. This is my favorite programming books of all time. It's easy to follow, good explanations and an excellent read. I've went on to become a lead programmer, and it all started here. Nostalgic, you bet. If you want to learn how to program in 'C', start here! I can't say anything more.

First, it's a very clear example of how to extend UML within its own rules for extension. Other authors need more than raw UML gives, so start adding cruft any way they want - wrong! UML was meant to be extended and has explicit points at which extension is allowed. This shows extension as it's meant to be done.

Second, it is a worthwhile application area. Frameworks have been around for years, important all out of proportion to the relativley small number of them and relatively small number of framework developers. Framework development deserves attention as a specific discipline, and it's good to see this kind of attention being paid. The authors have chosen parts of well known design patterns for examples, keeping the ideas readable and understandable.

Best, it doesn't try to pull the entire UML standard into the discussion. To tell the truth, if I printed out the whole set of UML standards documents, I'm not sure I'd be able to lift the pile. This uses a well-chosen subset of the standard, but still lets the afficionado use as much more of the standard as desired.

Still, it's just notation. It's a set of tags for making statements about frameworks. The book doesn't really go into the design of frameworks. Framework design appears to be a premise, something the reader already understands well - perhaps not a good assumption.

The real problem with this notation, though, is that it is barely useable without tool support. It's based on sets of tags, which refine other tags (using something like inheritance), which refine yet other tags. Looking at tag A, though, there is no way to know that it refines tag B. Nothing about the tag indicates its family tree of inheritance, or even where to look for the information. Also, the UML extension mechanism for tags appears not to have dealt with global uniqueness at all. Nothing prevents me and you from coming up with the same tag names independently, then causing collisions for our common customer. XML deals with global uniqueness fairly well. If XML conventions are compatible with UML, they should be used - if not, UML needs to create conventions.

On the whole, this is interesting and informative. It's nearly impossible to put to practical use without significant automation, however, and that automation is not available to me.

This book gives a fairly good insight for expanding the concept of UML designs and notations for more practical framework approaches.

This is a excellent book, since it provides good examples in how using patterns, frameworks and UML in practice.

This is a great book! It gives a good insight into Design Patterns, Framework, Components and UML. It is especially useful as it provides a good and practical explanation while combining these concepts.
I have always been into Design Patterns, Framework, Components and UML. Although still missing some points when mixing these concepts. This book definitely provides a good clarification as it goes further into these OO concepts.
In a whole, it's a book worth studying carefully.

Whenever I read about a new UML profile for something, I wonder whether it will be really useful and also usable. Well, the UML-F profile presented in this book, happens to be both -- useful and usable, for framework developers and users, but also for people interested in frameworks, patterns and OO in general.
It is a very good, easy-to-read book (contents and style):
the authors grasp the reader's attention from the very beginning, with motivating examples and good explanations.