From: rbs{at}snippets.org
To: c_echo{at}yahoogroups.com

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Jari J. Laaksonen wrote:

> Amazon UK has only used copies of it. Amazon Germany does not have it
> for purchasing anymore: "Führen wir nicht oder nicht mehr - jetzt
> gebraucht vorbestellen."

Drat! I was afraid of that...

> Do you need specifically this book? How's this different from any other
> C Style Guidelines available online nowadays?

If you start searching the net for references to writing coding standards,
you'll almost always wind up back at this book. For people involved in C
software QA, it's like the Bible of style. There really isn't any other
book I've seen out there quite like it. There are some that are close, but
they also dilute the C material with C++, and what makes C++ most readable
isn't necessarily the same thing as makes C most readable.

The most remarkable thing about it is that it doesn't start out talking
about programming - the entire first chapter is devoted to cognitive
psychology. Only after discussing the issue of what makes things more or
less readable does Straker get in to specific coding guidelines to best
implement the findings discussed in Chapter 1. As he does, he also
addresses the issue of maintainability as a tie-breaking consideration
when contemplating alternative styles. Even so, he clearly presents
alternatives and suggests ways to best implement each.

From a practical standpoint, I've had to write C coding standards a couple
of times in my life, and am having to do it again now. With Straker's book
available, a complete coding standards document - and ISO-9000 compliant
at that - can be written in 3 pages simply by quoting chapter and verse
from the Straker book as your company's preferred style - hence the
analogy to a "QA Bible".

A wonderful companion which is also available is "C Clearly", an excellent
code reformatter and pretty printer. Originally published by V
Communications for $130, it's now available exclusively from Mix Software
for only $30. As with some other excellent C tools (e.g. Software
Blacksmiths' C-Doc, Gimpel's PC-Lint), it's a bit long in the tooth and
its DOS command line ancestry shows through clearly. However, all are
still pretty much indispensable, being unique at their price points. All
are also part of my bag of secret weapons when tackling new consulting
jobs. It's the same where I'm working now - after I presented my first
preliminary analysis of their code base, the client marveled and asked how
I did it. Last week the company ordered copies of everything I'd used.

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