Customer Reviews

Programming Pearls (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is amazing! Its a true classic on algorithims.

I would place this on my list of the top 5 programming books of all time. A must read for every who calls themselves a "programmer".

I only have 2 years of programming experience. I read an awful lot of programming texts. Right now I have 10 books just on C itself. Not to mention all the java and C++ books... My point to saying this is, if you've already read as many books as I have, this book will do nothing for you. I read this book over the weekend and was just astonished with how simple minded it all was. I constantly said "Duh..." throughout the entire book. The pseudo code in this book was the worst I've ever seen. I have never returned a book before except for "Linux Socket Programming". I returned this one today.

The reason I did give this book 3 stars was because I can see it being extremely great for uneducated newbies. It will teach them a great deal and have them think about efficiency and general good programming practices.

I was amazed at all of the great reviews I saw with this book. Everyone that gave a review must of been new to computer programming. I was personally expecting a few more advanced topics such as real C and C++ code. Not the .... pseudo code that this author insisted on using.

Overall, this is a great book for neophytes. If you're new to programming, get this book and give it a good once over. Don't pay attention to his style though... As he stated in the book, it's due to the constraints on space and the fact he didn't want to write a 1200 page book. However, if you have gotten to the point where you've studied advanced data structures and algorithms and know what a linked list is and a binary tree and you understand the concepts behind a heap, priority queues and such, I'd go for another book that is going to advance your knowledge, not bring it back a step.