STANKULI%cs.umass.edu@RELAY.CS.NET (06/03/87)
*----- -----* | | | Review: Turbo PASCAL Program Library | Rugg and Feldman (1986); Que Corporation; Indianapolis, IN. From: Stan Kulikowski II, COINS/UMass,Amherst There seems to be quite a glut of intro PASCAL books (I got 17 new ones this semester and 15 last term). Only a small percentage recognize the microcomputer as a primary teaching medium. The few that do (usually a hand-me-down Turbo PASCAL or Macintosh edition) do not utilize the sexy advantages of a simple operating system, screen graphics, or even GOTOXY cursor controls. Even though we can teach on a personal dedicated system, the intro textbooks seem stuck on the curriculum developed years ago on time-sharing mainframes. Has anyone found a good CS-2 level textbook for Turbo PASCAL? Rugg and Feldman (1986) is not a data-structures text, but it could be a excellent secondary text to add the nice micro stuff which is missing in the standard second-level curriculum. This book is a collection of source code for a Turbo PASCAL library which covers lots of common problems in an advanced manner: Keyboard input Disk files Graphics effects Music and sounds Screen displays Sorting Printer interface Searching Converting Parsing Computer environment Math & Engineering Error handling Statistics & Probability Dates & Times Business & Finance Subprogram libraries A lot of good code is covered pretty well in this text. For example, the chapter on sorting has code for insorting and heapsorting for four different data types. Enough complete code to form a clear descriptive model for student use. The table of contents is very good at explaining each procedure or function so you can go right to the place where you want to be. An excellent source book and apparently all the code can be had on diskette for an extra $30. I wish the cost of softcopy were reasonable as there are a lot of good building blocks here for students to work with, if they did not have to invest their time copying code from textbook. I have found quite a few places where I can quibble about the qualities of their code... especially identifier names: UnderSc, PrtSc, DotPr, SubStrD, SplitCh ... these kind of names belong to C and UNIX folks whose fingers will fall off if they waste a keystroke for readability. Worse yet: knee-jerk one-letter variable names. Not elegant PASCAL. There also seems to be major omissions, like little or no use of dynamic variables or hash tables which are major components of CS-2 curriculum and should have been included in a program library at this algorithmic level. I wish the diskette with code had been sent with my copy of the text, so I could have done a more detailed review of code quality; but, from the authors' prose, you get the clear impression that they really care for the subject matter, so you will forgive the quibbles as pfiffling and appreciate the text for being well-thought-out medium-level algorithms. Just the thing for a second-level student to work with on a microcomputer. Those of you who teach should have this one on your shelf. If a liberal site licence could be had for softcopy at a reasonable price, it would be a good thing for students to use en masse. stan [EOF]Prog-Lib.Mai