home ‣ C Interfaces and Implementations

03 Aug 2002 · Tags: book, programming

← newer • 548 of 588 • older →

Finished reading C Interfaces and Implementations. Another one down, millions more to go.

Good advanced book on C that mostly wants to teach how to design (and implement) good, re-usable interfaces. It does that by showing full design and implementation of 24 interfaces (e.g. better memory allocation primitives, better string-handling primitives, lists, dynamic arrays, bit vectors, sequences, threads, etc.).

The book is not about analyzing/designing algorithms or data structures but about practical issues of how to design good interface (which is surprisingly hard). It's very to the point (doesn't have the flowery prose of many O'Reilly books, which for some might be an advantage and for some a disadvantage).

Two tips from the book (there are many others) worth remembering:

the only way to get good performance is by profiling. Always prefer a clean code over what you think is more efficient code. First you might be wrong (as most people are) and second you might not need the speed in the first place (if you speed up by 100% code that only takes 1% of total execution time, you'll improve total execution time by only imperceptible 0.5%).
use assert() generously (but beware of stupid mistakes)