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| Book: | Managing Projects with GNU Make | |
| Subject: | GNU Make | |
| Date: | 2006-01-10 00:48:36 | |
| From: | Anonymous Reader | |
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Rating:
 
GNU Make by Mecklenburg is a fine example of how not to teach. On the third page the author suddenly uses the term "flex scanner" without any attempt at defining the term. You are supposed to know what it means. Actually people who are well acquainted with flex scanners will also know about GNU Make so the book is not addressed at anybody's needs. On this page he writes "Here is a program to count" etc. What follows is a most curious C program. There is a function yylex which is called but never defined. Eagerly one reads on and he shows you a scanner, an undefined entity. It looks like program code except for the %%. I have seriously (more than one year each) programmed in LISP, IBM 360-370 Assembler, PL1, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal,C and for the last 14 years C++. There is no compiler for any of these languages which would accept the symbol %%. What does it mean? After a day's study looking in vain through the whole book, in which there are frequent allusions to the flex scanner(or flex scanner generator?) I finally guess that, contrary to the author's statement, this is not program code; it is data. So what is inside the function named yylex? One still doesn't know. Here is a person who doesn't know how to teach; uses terms without defining them and yet gets to put out three incarnations of his book! My former high impression of O'Reilly has dropped a lot. I have bought many O'Reilly books but from now on I will be extremely careful not to waste my money on any of them. I will make sure that I have personally and in detail looked at every alternative book. Unsurprisingly the author doesn't deign to add problems with answers. The learning process is unfamiliar to him. Enough said. |
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