WMARTIN@OFFICE-8@sri-unix (09/20/82)
From: WMartin at Office-8 (Will Martin) I am very late in distributing this summary of responses to my inquiry in late July regarding references to UNIX and "C" other than the standard documentation and the Kernighan & Ritchie "C" book. Sorry about that... Anyway, here it is: Quite a few people (including the authors!) pointed to A USER GUIDE TO THE UNIX SYSTEM, by Rebecca Thomas and Jean Yates. Independent evaluations rated it "Absolutely first-rate", "Great", "Excellent for the beginner", "Nice, "Easy to read", etc. No one seemed to dislike it. The authors mentioned that they were working on four more UNIX and XENIX books now, and planning two others, aimed at business users and programmers. This book is intended as an introductory book for non-programmers, by the way. It is published by Osborne-McGraw-Hill. Several people pointed to an article in the ACM SigPlan Notices, Vol 16 (12), Dec '81, by P. A. Fitzhorn and G. R. Johnson -- "C: Toward a Concise Syntactic Description". One mentioned that it discussed ambiguities and problems. He also mentioned an earlier article in the same journal: SigPlan Notices, Vol 15 (3), [March?] '80, no author mentioned -- "Type Syntax in the Language 'C'". I received a copy of a long review of Richard L. Gauthier's USING THE UNIX SYSTEM (Reston Pub. Co., Reston, VA 1982, $18.95) from W. H. Huggins, via the CSNet. (Also a review of the Thomas & Yates book, which he praised -- I'll forward a copy of these reviews to anyone who asks and to whom I can mail.) The most succinct summary of the Gauthier book is "a disaster in its execution"; the objective was laudable but the language and production resulted in a poor product. A number of respondents mentioned C NOTES from Yourdon; no author specified. Alan R. Feuer's THE C PUZZLE BOOK (Prentice Hall, 1982, $16.95) was described as a companion workbook for the Kernighan & Ritchie "C" book. One contributor, who teaches "C", recommended it as "excellent". The Bell System Technical Journal special UNIX issue (July-Aug '78) is still available direct from the Labs for $2.00 each, according to a couple people; some bookstores are selling it at $5.00. We had acquired a pile of these prior to my inquiry, but I had forgotten to mention that in my original message. A highly-praised but somewhat peripheral document is DEC's manual for VAX-VMS v3.0 "C", PROGRAMMING IN VAX-11 C, (DEC order code AA-L370A-TE). This is a paperbound book, and describes a "C" much like the Berkeley "C". It was recommended as a "stellar documentation job". Last comes news of a new UNIX book by Steve Bourne, to be published by Addison-Wesley about January '83. No other info yet available. Hope this is of help to you, and my thanks to all who responded. Will Martin