The authors, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, are two software veterans. Brian Kernighan is perhaps best known as co-author of The C-Programming Language -the classic C text book - which he published together with Dennis Ritchie. Together with Rob Pike he wrote the almost equally famous The Unix Programming Environment. The authors' outstanding reputation naturally raises the expectations for this book. They did not disappoint us: Although the paperback is relatively thin (only 250+ pages) it yet meets all expectations. It contains a lot of dense and important information about software programming and related topics providing insights that clearly stem from the authors? long term experience in this field.

The titles of the nine chapters give a good overview of the book?s scope. It covers:

Chapter 1:  Style
Chapter 2:  Algorithms and Data Structures
Chapter 3:  Design and Implementation
Chapter 4:  Interfaces
Chapter 5:  Debugging
Chapter 6:  Testing
Chapter 7:  Performance
Chapter 8:  Portability
Chapter 9:  Notation

Besides explaining the theoretical background the book shows numerous code examples that illustrate the reasoning. These examples are implemented in either one of the general programming languages C, C++, Java or one of the scripting languages Awk or Perl. A major example (in the Design and Implementation chapter) is implemented in all five languages and is used to compare the levels of abstraction that the languages C, C++, and Java support. The five implementations also demonstrate the significantly different approaches that general purpose languages as opposed to scripting languages take.

Experienced programmers might already have extracted many insights presented in the book from their own work. Yet the book can be interesting and entertaining reading: Compare the rules gained by own experience with those of Kernighan and Pike! For a novice programmer this book is a ?must have? because it provides a sound knowledge base of all aspects of programming without distracting by any buzzwords or hype.
 

Angelika Langer develops and teaches classes on advanced C++, STL, multithreading, internationalization, and Java. She has served on the ANSI/ISO C++ Committee since 1993. Klaus Kreft is a software architect and consultant with more than a decade of experience in industrial software development. He works for Siemens Business Services in Germany. Langer and Kreft are working on a book about standard C++ iostreams and locales and are columnists for C++ Report .