Packed with specifics which lend to both an overall understanding of concepts and the ability to...

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	• Write Portable Code: An Introduction to Developing Software for Multiple Platforms Brian Hook No Starch Press, 2005 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good for beginners

This is the only book I've seen that covers this material in-depth (The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike touches on the basics). If you've never worked on the development of a piece of cross-platform software, this book will help you avoid a lot of the pitfalls that many programmers have overcome through trial and error. Otherwise, there's not much novel material here for you.

The first half of this book decribes the method for writing portable code with a good high-level philosophy (introduce abstraction and indirection wherever necessary) as well as delving into a lot of the specifics of how to accomplish it. All the bases are covered. The second half of the book offers an unfortunately shallow review of the different subsystems that differ between platforms without giving any real options for how to bridge the gaps.

Overall, the book is well written and correct. On the downside there's nothing ground-breaking here and the effective length of the book is about half of its actual length given the disappointing second half.

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I need this book

Enter Brian Hook's Write Portable Code. Portability is a sort of a holy grail for programmers, and there is no lack of knowledge floating around Usenet and Internet. However, Brian Hook tried to recommend a book on the subject to a friend, and didn't find one. So he set out to write his own.

The result is a tome that should reside on every programmers desk sooner or later. The book's cover pictures a donkey striving uphill, and I can definitely releate to that. Portability is not only a target hard to aquire, but it is also a target roaming about in a minefield. I consider myself a best-practice programmer: stability and portability is important to me. However, while reading this book, I quickly realized that I know nothing. Each and every chapter contained possible gotchas that have eluded me for years. This book does two things: it points out those gotchas, and it gives the reader oodles of clever tricks, background info and solutions. And best of all, those tricks are often of the stablest possible quality.

Diving into this book, I had to break up old ideas about what is safe and not. For can you rely on sizeof(int)? Are you sure main() is your entry point? What if you need to move to a mixed-endian platform? Westwood's assumptions about floating point behaviour made it impossible for Aspyr to implement network play across platforms for Command & Conquer: Generals. Deciding on portability is also a matter of choosing your platforms. Hook points out that you can write a program that runs the same on a clustered super computer as well as a coffee machine, but it doesn't make much sense. Instead, establishing a baseline will go a long way towards keeping your sanity. He does not, however, back down from tricky configurations: there are recommendations and warnings that apply to esoteric platforms, e.g. embedded environments with very limited resources.

Many of the examples in the book are drawn from a cross-platform audio library (SAL) that Brian Hook has written. Seeing the concepts in the book in their actual implementation brings a lot to the table - his treatise points out both goals, possible problems, and solutions.

Since the book is so C++-centric, I would have valued information on the Standard Template Library (STL). While its name promises a standard, it has a few extensions that might not always be around. Performance characteristics also vary across implementations.

Brian Hook has a remarkably clear and readable language. Even though the material in the book is complex, and Hook is writing in a very to-the-point manner, every nuance of the issue gets across. A result of many hours of editing, I'm sure, and those were hours well spent. I finally managed to get the ISO, ANSI, IEEE and many of their different standards sorted out in my head, no small feat for Brian!

Achieving portability is a matter of being extremely cautious, and it is surrounded by many misconceptions and myths. In that regard, Provided that Brian is right (which I'm really not qualified to tell), he becomes a sort of myth-buster. However, since he comes from a background with portability engineering at id Software and 3Dfx, he does have the history to back up his tricks.

The book is very C/C++-centric, but many of the concepts are directly portable to other languages such as (yes) Java. As for the code samples, they are a bit long-winded at times, but always clear. My only gripe is that some of the Mac source code samples aren't always optimal - they are correct and work, but could sometimes have been accomplished in a less complex way. That is, however, mostly a question of form.

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Packed with specifics which lend to both an overall understanding of concepts and the ability to troubleshoot common problems

Brian Hook's Write Portable Code: An Introduction To Developing Software For Multiple Platforms covers all the basics of writing code for cross-platform use. From avoiding common portability mistakes and finding bugs inherent in platform-specific behaviors to understanding filesystems and understanding preprocessors, Write Portable Code is packed with specifics which lend to both an overall understanding of concepts and the ability to troubleshoot common problems.

Excellent Book, Misleading Title

This book is an excellent read. The material is presented completely, concisely, and in an easy to understand manner. However the title of this book is misleading. It really should be "Write Portable code in C". There is some limited discussion of C++, but mostly to discourage you from using it. All other languages are dismissed out of hand, or just completely ignored. As long as you understand this caveat there is much to learn from this book.

This book is really focused on writing software that will run on essentially any platform that has a C compiler, which today is almost all processors. If you need to write software that will run on embedded 16 bit processors as well as the latest 64 bit ones, then you should read this book. However, there are large classes of software that have a more limited notion of portability (such as running on most 32 bit Unix or Windows platforms, or any platform that g++ can target) where Standard C++ or Java are the way to go. Unfortunately the book does not adequately address the tradeoffs, design, and implementation decisions one should make in these cases. In particular, I am puzzled by the total lack of Java solutions.

Since the book emphasizes C programming, there is minimal content on GUI programming, Web programming, database programming, and similar areas where C programming is rarely used anymore.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Portable software development is writing software that runs on a broad range of computer systems instead of just one (e.g., Windows). Programmers often pick up the idioms, tricks and methodologies for developing cross-platform software through sheer trial and error, as they encounter the same mistakes and patterns of code over time. If you're an intermediate-to advanced-level programmer who'd rather cut to the chase, Write Portable Code contains the lessons, patterns and knowledge you'll need for developing cross-platform software.

Write Portable Code explains how to: avoid common portability mistakes when starting out a new project, thereby saving time when a port must occur re-factor existing, non-portable code so that it can be easily transplanted to new platforms find bugs masked by platform specific behaviors

Programmers who avoid becoming married to a specific development environment or target platform greatly expand the target market for their software products. Whether you design cross-platform software from the ground up or have to move large amounts of code from one platform to another, the information contained in Write Portable Code will help you achieve your goals and grow as a programmer.

TOC
Preface
Introduction Chapter 1: Preparing for Portability Chapter 2: ANSI C/C++ Chapter 3: Techniques for Portability Chapter 4: Editing and Source Control Chapter 5: Processor Differences Chapter 6: Floating Point Chapter 7: Preprocessor Chapter 8: Compiler Quirks Chapter 9: User Interaction Chapter 10: Networking Chapter 11: Operating Systems Chapter 12: Dynamic Libraries Chapter 13: Security and Permissions Chapter 14: File Systems Chapter 15: Scalability and Portability Chapter 16: Portability and Data Chapter 17: Internationalization and Localization Chapter 18: Scripting Languages Chapter 19: Cross-platform Libraries and Toolkits
Appendix A: POSH Appendix B: The Simple Audio Library Appendix C: The Rules for Portability References

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