Book update: Pointers in C and and Computational Thinking

So, my C pointers book apparently has a cover now. Before you complain, I don’t write the titles (although I don’t disagree with the title for this book), nor the subtitles (where I do for this one). I don’t know what they mean by “modern approach to memory management”. It’s malloc() and free() and some tricks for that, like reference counting and allocation pools.

I am not entirely happy with the book description either, but I think I have a chance of changing that. I will write to Apress about it anyway. The last couple of times, they sent me the cover and description before they put it online, and I don’t know why they didn’t this time.

Anyway, when the cover is there, the release date is not far behind. I don’t know when it will be yet, not even the conservative date they use right up until the book is out, but it is still some weeks away. I haven’t received the tech-reviews yet, so naturally they don’t have the finished text. They don’t have it before I have it, because I’m the one writing it.

These are the topics I cover in the book:

In other news, I just received an email from Apress about being my Introduction to Computational Thinking book. I need to send back some revisions to the contract—the deadlines are unrealistic, as they want me to finish it in a couple of months, while I am still revising the C pointers book—but I plan to sell it. In all except one case, it has been a pleasure working with Apress.

I had planned a handful chapters more for the book, but they will have to go then. Some string algorithms, graph algorithms, and a chapter on domain-specific languages that I was looking forward to. They would take the book above a thousand pages, and I learned, when the C pointers book grew out of control, that the distributors will have a problem with that. The contract they sent me suggested 600 pages, but since the current draft already has 800, I will see if I can get away with something of that size. I will probably find somewhere to write about the additional topics some other day.

If they agree, the outline of the book will look something like this: