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The New C Standard

Posted by Zonk on from the meet-the-new-boss dept.

derek_farn writes "At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, 'The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary'. Now that the copyright issues have been sorted out I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror 1). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them). One major new angle is using the results from studies in cognitive psychology to try and figure out how developers comprehend code. The aim being to try and produce some coding guidelines that reduce costs (ie, reduce the time needed and bugs created). The book also contains the results of lots of measurements (over 400 figures and tables) in an attempt to back the arguments being made -- another unusual feature since most software related books don't publish any figures to back up what they say. Other subsections discuss common implementations and differences between the latest draft standard and C90/C++. More background on the project is available from the Inquirer.

6 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror of pdf here by derek_farn · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is another mirror of the pdf here thanks to the folk at mirrordot.

  2. Re:can anyone set up a .torrent ? by mwilliamson · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sure, here ya go.
    http://puffin.tamucc.edu/cbook1_0a.pdf.torrent

  3. The Book's WWW homepage by nadamsieee · · Score: 4, Informative

    The book's homepage can be found here: http://www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html

  4. Author comments by derek_farn · · Score: 4, Informative
    I have been receiving two kinds of email:
    • Requests for a dead tree version of the pdf. I have invested the possibility of self publishing. The problem is that these companies are not set up for high page counts (1,616) and an A4'ish page size (ok, and self-publishers are currently offering a less than stunning deal; the ROI is small).

      People could try ordering from Amazon, the ISBN number is 0201709171. Perhaps Addison Wesley will change their mind if enough order are received.

    • Information on typos. Please keep sending these to me. I am keeping a log of these so that writers of grammar checkers have some real world data.
  5. Availability through LULU by ewilts · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you considered making the book available through http://www.lulu.com/? It's a print-on-demand service that allows people an easy way to get a properly bound printed copy of your book, and for you optionally to get some money for your efforts. No cost to you to get set up either.

    No, I don't work for lulu or have any financial connections to them. I just know one of the guys that works there (Jeremy Hogan, formerly from Red Hat).

    --
    .../Ed
  6. Re:Did you consider.... by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Informative

    > You could also consider "self-publishing"

    Right on! You can get a run of 1000 copies of a soft cover book printed by someone like BookMasters for $5K or so, even for a monster like this one. Just stick with a 4 color cover and black/white in the text. And if you can charge $40 or so for this tome, you can cover your printing costs after selling only 150 copies.

    [plug]
    That's what I'm doing with PMD Applied; seems to be working out well so far.
    [/plug]

    --
    The Army reading list