The Practice of Programming

Rating:
Summary: Good software engineering tool
Review: This book is a great concise text on good software engineering and programming practices. It touches on pretty much all the aspects of planning a software project, as well as writing good, professionally done code. The examples are relevant and certainly help to reinforce the writing.
However, this book is not for anyone who has taken any serious amount of Computer Science/Engineering classes, or has worked in a serious software engineering position for even a year or two. As I was reading it, I found that it was all good information, but that I pretty much already knew most of what was said.
I would hestitate to call this book 'basic', but I think that it's aimed at people who are still developing their coding and engineering skills, and not meant for those who are trying to "touch-up" or perfect them (to the extent that that is possible). By that same token however, plenty of people who have a college degree in computers or work for a software company write bad, unprofessional, not-well-tested code. You should seriously evaluate your own competence and practices before you decide to pass or purchase this book.
The only other note is that the very last chapter on notation seems to be written at a level much higher than the others. It didn't really seem like it fit in too well with the tone and pace of the rest of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Good software engineering tool
Review: This book is a great concise text on good software engineering and programming practices. It touches on pretty much all the aspects of planning a software project, as well as writing good, professionally done code. The examples are relevant and certainly help to reinforce the writing.
However, this book is not for anyone who has taken any serious amount of Computer Science/Engineering classes, or has worked in a serious software engineering position for even a year or two. As I was reading it, I found that it was all good information, but that I pretty much already knew most of what was said.
I would hestitate to call this book 'basic', but I think that it's aimed at people who are still developing their coding and engineering skills, and not meant for those who are trying to "touch-up" or perfect them (to the extent that that is possible). By that same token however, plenty of people who have a college degree in computers or work for a software company write bad, unprofessional, not-well-tested code. You should seriously evaluate your own competence and practices before you decide to pass or purchase this book.
The only other note is that the very last chapter on notation seems to be written at a level much higher than the others. It didn't really seem like it fit in too well with the tone and pace of the rest of the book.

Rating:
Summary: INCOMPLETE
Review: This book is a too fast made booklet to treat such a delicate argument. The Java examples seem a last minute add. A lot of important arguments are not present. I cannot substitute the book"Code Complete " with this one.Absolutely not.

Rating:
Summary: Great book for intermediate programmers/hackers
Review: This book is basically all the "common sense" stuff that you learn after programming for years and years.. most proffessional programmers already know this stuff--or should! This is a perfect book for a college graduate who is good, but needs some pointers in the real world, or for those who just want to freshen up their skills, etc. Beware though, this book is not "Programming for Dummies" you must already be well familiar with C/C++ and some algorithms and data structures to fully understand what the author is trying to convey, at times. But even if you don't, it's still a great book... it is (or will be) one of those classics like The C Programming Language, which every programmer has on their bookshelf. Pretty much any book written by Kernighan or published by A-W (Professional series) is a worthwhile read...

In a nutshell, as they say in the book: this is what most people should have learned in college, but couldn't or didn't. Get it if only to read the first chapter on style... I for one hate rewriting or reading people's code who didn't know how to write it well/clear, or comment it well.

Rating:
Summary: Great book for intermediate programmers/hackers
Review: This book is basically all the "common sense" stuff that you learn after programming for years and years.. most proffessional programmers already know this stuff--or should! This is a perfect book for a college graduate who is good, but needs some pointers in the real world, or for those who just want to freshen up their skills, etc. Beware though, this book is not "Programming for Dummies" you must already be well familiar with C/C++ and some algorithms and data structures to fully understand what the author is trying to convey, at times. But even if you don't, it's still a great book... it is (or will be) one of those classics like The C Programming Language, which every programmer has on their bookshelf. Pretty much any book written by Kernighan or published by A-W (Professional series) is a worthwhile read...

In a nutshell, as they say in the book: this is what most people should have learned in college, but couldn't or didn't. Get it if only to read the first chapter on style... I for one hate rewriting or reading people's code who didn't know how to write it well/clear, or comment it well.

Rating:
Summary: Experience distilled into a book
Review: This book is perfect, it's not really for beginners, but more for someone crossing over to an intermediate level of programming, and wishes to learn some golden rules to keep in mind while programming.

The book is written in an incredibly simple and straight-forward way, which makes everything incredibly simple to grasp, and memorable. I know more than a handful of UNIX programmers that all either keep this book on their desktop for reference, or read it at least once a year.

This is the book I'd recommend to anyone who wants to "program better", this book probably won't teach you any new techniques, but it will teach you how to make your code more solid, more readable, and more enjoyable to maintain/debug.

Rating:
Summary: Should be called The Practice of Programming in C
Review: This book is way too C-centric for me (I do Perl pretty much exclusively). A lot of discussion of topics like memory management and such that is not terribly interesting for many programmers. In addition, most of the material seemed like the kind of thing a decent programmer will pick up on the job after a year or two if they are any good.

That said, this would probably make a great text for students in school who don't have much experience dealing with large, evolving projects, no matter what their preferred language is.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining reading
Review: This book won't teach you how to program. It won't teach you how to solve that one problem you've been struggling with for days. It won't revolutionize your programming practice. It will, however, be entertaining reading. Pike and Kernighan obviously have a story or two to tell, and they relate to them in their suggestions for programming practices. For anyone with practical experience most things will be fairly basic and obvious. No one is ever a complete programmer though, and there are tidbits you will pick up here and there.

I would mostly recommend this book to someone who enjoys reading a little bit of entertaining computer history and like to hear about Kernighan's and Pike's own experiences in becoming experts of programming.

Rating:
Summary: A waste of time
Review: This book would be great if you want a review of what state-of-the-art programming in the 70's was like -- the Java snippets (which look like they were added as an afterthought) not withstanding. The book's coverage is as moldy as the many C language examples it presents (come to think of it, the only good I got from this book was a refresher in how badly designed C was).

If you want a real "Practice of Programming" book read McConnell's Code Complete.

Rating:
Summary: Other choices are better
Review: This book would have been fine 10 years ago. However, the topics covered here are better covered elsewhere, by other authors (Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer). There's very little in this book that is not covered in the other books, and combined, they covered more areas better.

In short: Better value can be found elsewhere.