Let’s talk about this book written by Bob Flanders and Michael Holmes in 1993 entitled “C LAB NOTES”.

The title hints that this may be a book about programming in the C language. Spoiler: it is not a book about how to program in C, even though it uses the C language. Instead, it provides you with several interesting, examples about how to tack real world problems (at least, problems that existed in 1993). Here is a run down of the topics being explored:

1. Setting the system clock via modem and the United State Naval Observatory’s cesium clock.
2. Collecting program statistics around interrupts used, video modes, disk access.
3. Running programs on other nodes via Novell NetWare; sending messages is also explored.
4. Interacting with laser printers.
5. Phone dialing using a modem.
6. Synchronizing directory contents.
7. Automatically retrieving the latest files from multiple directories.
8. Analyzing disk structure, such as clusters and sectors.
9. Managing your appointments with a custom calendar.

This was such a fascinating book back in the day. I had limited income to spend on expensive computer programming texts. Many of the programming books that were available in my local bookstore tended to focus on abstract problems that served to introduce foundational concepts. It was so refreshing to see these sorts of problems being explored. Even today, so much literature is written around how a specific technology works, but so few products are written where the author just assumes you know something about the technologies being used. If they used those assumptions constructively, they could dive straight into interesting problems. It would imagine it might be more difficult to find a publisher who would back you on writing a book like this today; they may look at the material and say it would be too hard for most readers to understand, and therefore would not sell particularly well. They would probably be right on both counts.

In any case, I think we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that advanced books like these are being quickly fazed out and replaced by much more mainstream titles. After all, once a programmer knows how to sort a linked list or draw a simple scene in OpenGL or Unity, there is really nothing else worth exploring.

Categories: Books, DOS, Programming
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