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Author/s : Keir Davis, John W. Turner, Nathan Yocom
Publisher : Apress
Category : Other
Review by : Derek Anderson
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
To provide a context, I intended to review this book for my own personal enjoyment and for consideration as a supplemental text for an undergraduate college course, production languages, which I teach in C and C++. I was happy overall with this book, so I will start with the pros. This book is great for beginners and I believe that I will recommend it for those that are still developing a programming foundation. I feel that the book reads well, provides nice definitions, has good organization, and is nicely complemented through ok examples and implementation.
On the other not so positive side, I failed to see the 'definitive'
word that the title included. The authors make reference to how this book is a blend of theory and implementation, which turns out to be no real theory but rather just domain and background information mixed in with syntax, libraries, and code examples. I saw little 'code tips', but never felt that I directly learned from these 'experts'. This is not a bad thing, but 'experts' and 'moderately experienced' network programmers will more then likely pick nothing up from this book. I feel that the majority of this book is just a summarization of information I have found on the WWW, but put together in one nice and convenient package that I will keep on the shelf as a reference manual.
In summary, this book will bring any beginner up to speed and it will be worth the price they are asking.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk