File Structures: An Object-Oriented Approach with C++

4 stars instead of 5, because I had to write my own Makefile in order to compile. Aparently, presented makefiles were designed to compile all examples at once, and I only needed a little piece of that.

Also, the information is a bit scattered around the book and it is not always easy to find what you need. But it is there, so you just need to work on it. After all, this subject is not covered at all in other books, so I would say it is a must have book for any programmer who works with files.


easy to use   January 27, 2004
 0 out of 2 found this review helpful

i love this book...used it in my file structures course obviously, and i found it very useful


Plenty of great information, could have been presented bette   December 21, 2002
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This text was used for a junior-level File Manipulation Techniques course. We skipped around quite a bit in this book and did not use any of the C++/Unix material. I think (and I'm sure my professor does) that this book could be stripped down a quite a bit to present more topics when used for the classroom. What is presented is done well. This is a well-rounded text that should appeal to students and professionals alike. However, from the student's perspective, there is a lot of superfluous material. It is still one of the best, if not then it is the best, book on file structures and algorithms.

The programs for class were in Visual Basic .NET . It was not hard to adapt sections from the text when writing programs for a different language.

Our class moved through the book as follows: chapters 1-4 (introduction to external storage, files of records); start of chapter 8 (cosequential processes); chapters 5 and 6 (record access, insertion and deletion); end of chapter 8 (sorting large files); chapter 11 (hashing); chapter 7 and 9 (indexing and B-trees).

Once I was able to figure out what I could skip and what was important, I was able to read the chapters quickly and understand the material without a lot of re-reading. This book shed new light on an area of computer science that I didn't know much about. After taking the class/reading the book, I feel that I understand well what was being taught. I would still recommend this book to students because there is nothing else quite as up-to-date and it is quite easy to read and learn from.


Too complex for an introductory to File Processing   October 6, 2002
 1 out of 4 found this review helpful

As a student, I have found this book to inhibit my studies more than help them. Instead of presenting the concepts clearly, concisely and with as little overhead as possible, this author seems to go out of his way to make it harder than it should be. The reader ends up wading through the examples, trying to find the core concept that should have been given up front. This student has discussed this book at length with fellow students, and has yet to find one who enjoys the book. We learn, but only after spending too much time filtering out junk.