sandhawk

Currently, I’m in chapter 18. Which I believe should have been among the first chapters. Chapter 18 is particularly interesting because the author insists that project estimators should simply capitulate to not having the project done on time.

While it’s true that projects are rarely delivered on time and on budget, the particular methodology that he advocates is, in my mind, doomed to failure and his advice to simply give in to not having the project fully completed by the deadline sort of makes sense in that case.

But the fact is, I’ve only missed a deadline once. And that was due to my unwillingness to walk away when the customer kept monkeying with the specifications. It was my fault. But I no longer allow changes after the fact to specs anymore. And I no longer miss deadlines.

This approach is controversial and I’m often accused of being inflexible. Of course, the discussion usually stops when I offer to renegotiate the cost or deadline. I guess I am somewhat flexible but the customer must also be.

There have been many more features I’ve gone through, but I only have about 15 minutes for this entry (the first in weeks) and so I can’t go through each of those chapters. I do find the overall arrangement of the book (with these last chapters looking a lot like filler) to be odd. But more about that when I can give my final verdict on the experiment and the feasibility of the book’s thesis.

Finally feeling good enough to make an entry on this.

References are a vital tool for resolving many problems in programming. The author does a decent job of covering the subject but references in C++ are essentially the same as they are in C.

Of more interest the chapter on advanced functions covers something I never knew about C++. These are virtually all related to working with objects. The overloading (or changing the behavior) of operators (such as the minus sign and the plus sign) is a neat feature. Though I realized that this a logical extension of the language, since there is an occasional necessity to use those operators with programmer created objects. It’s a long chapter but in the hands of a dedicated reader, it would yield – and probably in less than an hour.

Perhaps the most slippery aspect for beginners in programming. I learned C in an environment that requires the use of pointers (PalmOS) so, I wasn’t terribly concerned.

I did spot a typo, though. After carefully introducing the new and delete keywords (new allocates memory and returns the address of the allocated memory and delete deallocates it) a FAQ box referred to a malloc() call.

malloc() (memory allocate) is a C – NOT C++ – call that does the same as the new keyword in C++.

This the first of what will probably be many typos. This was common for many technical books of the time…There was, literally, a gold rush as people poured into the technology market and book companies rushed their books into print to capitalize on the interest of those folks. It was the largest section in the bookstore the day I bought this book.

My work on this experiment continues apace (despite my illness).