Victor R. Volkman (ed.)
C/C++ Treasure Chest
R&D Books. ISBN 0-87930-514-2. Pp. 224. $39.95. Includes CD.

Reviewed by Clif Flynt <clif@cflynt.com>

One of the features that distinguishes experienced programmers from newbies is the bag of tricks that old-timers carry around in their heads (or on a floppy disk). These tried-and-true code snippets let the old pros go straight to solving a problem, instead of figuring out how to handle the details. We call this code
reuse.

The biggest hurdle to code reusability is finding the code you want to use. I suspect that all of us have spent days writing some marvelously clever code, only to have a friend say, "Why didn't you just steal the code from the foo package?"

For the past 15 years, the C/C++ Users Group has collected source code and made it available for other programmers to examine, use, and steal ideas from. The trick has been finding the package that has what you need now. C/C++ Treasure Chest, compiled by Victor Volkman, makes a big dent in solving this problem. The book contains brief descriptions of literally hundreds of C and C++ programs, libraries, and documentation, indexed by keyword, type of functionality, OS/CPU, and title.

Along with the book is a CD-ROM containing the complete C Users Group code distributions, with HTML indexes to direct users to the package they need. These indexes and HTML pages make the difference between 400 packages of data and 400 packages of information.

This book will pay for itself if you find a single package that saves you an hour. My bet is that you'll find more than one package, be it the genetic-algorithm and neural-network toolkits, the OS-independent screen editors, the JPEG library, SQL package, linked-list library, the MS-DOS TSR tools, or other packages. The range of code available is astounding, and, most important, you can find the code you need.