I bought this book when it first came out and
remembered then being horrified by the coding
style used. As has been mentioned in several
other comments already, nobody, and I do mean
nobody who writes code professionally would
put huge seven line banner comments above the
simplest pieces of code.
I picked it up again today and was so taken
aback (again) by the coding style that I just
felt I had to write to ask, beg, that O'Reilly
re-release it in a new edition with the coding
style fixed.
As a concrete example consider Example 8-3 which
starts on page 152. This sprawls across over
no less than 5 pages, when it should, at most,
take up 2. The ironic thing is that the comments
which were (I hope) intended to make things
clearer in fact make the code almost unreadable.
Having said all that, overall I do like the
book. In general its well written and manages
to steer clear of the same tired examples that
most books of this type use. With proper code
snippets this would easily be a 4 or 5 star
book. The way it is at the moment its just
about a 3 star.
There is a market for this book and an
expanded second edition would be most welcome,
but please, please fix the code snippets.
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