Software Tools in C++
jezuk.co.uk
jezuk.co.uk
i was already a big fan of Brian Kernighan and Bell Labs. but what made me curious about the book was the essay against pascal that came after the book. the criticism felt (to me at least) justified by all the necessary workaround used in the book to get things to work.
i was a big fan of Niklaus Wirth and ETH too. and i understood the ideas and goals of pascal. if Bell Labs had waited a tad bit they would have been happier with Modula or Oberon. but we wouldn't have got unix nor c :)
i also got my hands on the original as well: software tools in ratfor. ratfor was that language that did not exist (iirc) based on fortran. the software tools were the same. and it was impressive to see the same tools in two different languages.
the other thing you get from these books is a sense of what they were working on and coding at Bell Labs. what would later become part of the unix system, the c language and its libraries.
again highly recommended.
Great book. I first read it back in the 1980s (still have my copy), it was key component of my self-taught[0] programming skills that I parlayed into a twenty-plus year career as a sysadmin, DBA, and yes, programmer.
[0] well, I did take one computer science course, PDP-11 assembly language, while I was in graduate business school, but other than that, completely self-taught.