Olivier Langlois's blog

I just started to read this book which is an updated version of Practical Cryptography. This book is coauthored by Bruce Schneier. From what I have seen so far. It looks like a very nice introduction to cryptography that is very accessible. For more in depth coverage on cryptography, I would recommend looking at Applied cryptography. I will probably have more to say about the book when I am done reading it.

This book wants to be the encyclopedia of networking science. It is very complete and covers a lot of topics. In my opinion, this is not very useful because you either read a chapter covering a topic that you already totally master and hence learn nothing or the topic is totally new and the book barely scratches the surface of the topic letting many questions unanswered.

It is a very complete guide. It did allow me to understand my own blog CSS code and I have been able to fix an alignment problem related to margin values in <div> tag style property. Since my banner was displaying correctly in IE (incorrect behavior) but was misaligned in Firefox, a full understanding of CSS was necessary to figure out what was wrong and this book helped a lot. This small experience did allow me to appreciate the type of challenges HTML professionals are confronted to daily to support a wide range of browsers.

My only complain, and maybe it is because HTML editing is not my thing, is that while I was reading the book, I did not felt the author has succeeded in transmitting his passion for the topic. Instead reading this book felt as exciting as reading a dictionary for the most part. For this reason, I would not recommend it for learning CSS but if you need a good reference document then it might do fine.

This is the latest book from Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language. It has been published very recently and I did not have yet the opportunity to take a look yet so for now I am just spreading the news about its publication.

This book has been published in 1993 and iostreams has changed a lot since then so this book is a bit outdated. Things that were not there in 1993 include:

• extension less header files
• std namespace
• IO stream classes were not templates
• No locale and facet classes
• classes that are now deprecated strstream

Surprisingly even with all these changes, most of the code in the book would still compile today. This is one sign that C++ designers took a great care to not break existing code unless absolutely necessary. The book is divided into different chapters. Materials that have still value today are:

• The first 3 chapters that explain why a programmer should prefer using io streams over printf
• The next few chapters describing the translator classes (istream,ostream,etc)
• Even if the code is rather cryptic in my opinion, there is a chapter that shows how to write table based extractor and inserter functions (operator<< and operator>>). One application of such function, for instance would be to implement a regular expression processor with a DFA.

There are easier ways to implement regular expressions with the boost library. The value that I see in the third point is that I have always kept my own operators << and >> very simple and I have found this part of the book was eye opening to what was possible to do with these functions.

The chapter that I have found to have failed the test of time is the last and very lengthy chapter that presents close to 50 small test programs so you could test that your iostream implementation was compliant with the latest C++ draft specifications for iostreams. At the publishing time, it was perhaps needed as C++ implementations were trying to catch up with a moving standard but today, iostreams specifications have been stable for many years. I think that it is safe to take for granted that your iostreams behavior is compliant with the standard or it should be a total shame for the library developer if it is not the case.

To conclude, since the book is still accurate on most points, it can still be handy as a reference if it is hanging around. However, at the same time, since iostreams have changed in subtle ways since the publishing date, I would recommend looking for a more recent book for a new purchase. I have not read it but 'Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales' might be a better choice.