'C' without tears

PROGRAMMING IN `C': R. Subburaj; Vikas Publishing House; Distributors: UBS Publishers' Distributors, 5, Ansari Road, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 150.

THERE IS a tendency these days to play down the importance of hard-core, seat-of-the-pants programming skills in an Internet era where ``made for dummies'' is the ruling ``mantra''.

But the fact remains that anyone who aspires to carve out a profession in the software world, must be able to handle the rudiments of programming in some measure.

`C' today is what ``Fortran'' was two decades ago: the mother code from which all subsequent programming languages have grown. Unix or C++ or Java or even the currently fashionable Linux, have all grown out of a bedrock of C coding - and it is virtually impossible to acquire any measure of competence in these newer variants, unless one has studied C.

Which is the reason this self-contained personal tutor on the subject is both timely and relevant.

The author is a senior director with the Chennai unit of the Ministry of Information Technology's Electronics Test and Development Centre (ETDC) and an experienced teacher to boot. He has designed the book primarily as a text for students of the DOEACC courses, but it is comprehensive enough to be of use to any of the many graduate level computer applications courses that are springing up at every university.

As one who has himself struggled down this path albeit many years ago, the reviewer was relieved to see that the author sticks to an exposition of classical C, without frequent deviations to explain the later versions like C++.

This would have immediately ``dated'' the book. Once the fundamentals have been mastered, it is a smaller matter for the student, to take note of the most recent changes.

Since many of these BCA and MCA courses now adopt an ``objective'' method of evaluation, the author wisely uses a similar discipline in providing short review questions of the true-or-false type after every module. More usefully, he includes a number of case studies throughout the text, which are useful as real life examples of C programming.

An attractive and painless tutorial aid for those who are ready to take the first step on the ladder of contemporary computer programming.

ANAND PARTHASARATHY

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