Reviewers and readers have enthused over previous 'Illustrating' books from the pen of Donald Alcock; his unique formula using graphics and calligraphy to explain what else would take a thousand words is here applied to illustrate ANSI C. As usual, Alcock emphasizes learning by writing programs and working through them. Plenty of real programs are used to good effect, so that by the end of the book advanced topics have been described by means of increasingly sophisticated examples. A feature of the layout is the double-page spread: each of these covers a particular topic making the book useful as a reference manual. Moreover each spread is made as self-contained as is reasonably possible - ideal for browsing. For the programmer with a grounding in one language, such as FORTRAN, this book will give an excellent introduction to standard C - one that emphasizes the self-discipline needed to write portable programs. This revised edition has benefited from many corrections and updates
To make a computer do a calculation, however simple, you must describe every step of that calculation in a language the computer can understand: this description is called a program. This book presents a popular and widely available language called BASIC and explains how to write simple programs in it.
Fortran is a computer language that has been around for a quarter of a century, and is still much used despite predictions throughout its life that it would be replaced by more elegant languages. But Fortran is still the only language in which it is possible to write truly portable programs. Using his own special formula, Donald Alcock now does for Fortran what he did for BASIC in his earlier book, Illustrating BASIC. The Fortran described and illustrated is that defined by the American National Standards Institute in 1966 but with allusions to the same Institute's standard published in 1978. For both the person who is new to computers and programming, and the person who has met only BASIC before, this book will give an excellent introduction to standard Fortran; it also provides a reference manual for the language.
This book may be used as a self-contained manual for BBC-BASIC, the main language of the BBC Microcomputer and Master Series Computers. Information is presented in a form handy for reference. Page 163, for example, tabulates all characters in the ASCII range; pages 124-5 summarize all information needed when composing screens of MODE 7 graphics. A quick reference to all functions and operators is given on page 179; the syntax of every statement and command of BBC-Basic is summarized on pages 180-1. But there is more to this book. How do you make a computer sort names into alphabetical order? Not as obvious as it might seem. Three different sorting techniques are explained by example in this book: bubble sort, monkey puzzle (more formally the 'binary tree') and Quicksort relies on 'recursion' - an important programming concept which is explained and demonstrated. Making coloured objects rebound around the walls of a squash court is another technique demonstrated; so is making voices sin
This book, written entirely by hand, is an introduction to programming in Pascal. It starts with the fundamental concept of a stored program and works through to the manipulation of records in dynamic storage. The style of presentation is pictorial. This book may be used as a self-contained reference manual for Pascal to BS 6192 and ISO 7185. Besides defining the statements and structures of Pascal this book illustrates the use of such features in small but complete programs. These programs introduce fundamental techniques of programming such as symbol-state tables, bubble sort, quicksoft, stacks and queues, reverse Polish notation, linked lists, shortest-route technique, doubly linked rings, binary trees, hashing technique and other tools of the programmer's trade.
