Herbert Schildt

Herbert Schildt is an American computer science author whose books, particularly on C programming, have been best-sellers in three decades.

Life

Schildt is a computer science author who holds both graduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His earliest books were published in the 1985-1986 time frame. (The book "Advanced Modula-2" from 1987 says on the cover that it is his sixth book.)

His books are all published by Osborne, an early computer book publisher which concentrated on titles for the personal computer, and after the acquisition of Osborne by McGraw-Hill, the imprint continued publishing Schildt's work until the imprint was subsumed completely into the larger company.

Little C

One of Schildt's most enduring projects is the Little C interpreter, which is a lengthy example of a hand-written recursive-descent parser which interprets a subset of the C language. The program was originally published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in August, 1989 entitled "Building your own C interpreter". This example was included in the book "Born to Code In C" (Osborne, 1989) and in a later edition of "C: The Complete Reference".

The code for this interpreter can be found online in several places, including Internet archives of old Dr. Dobb's Journal disks and the McGraw-Hill web site for code downloads.

Schildt's book "The Art of C++" features an interpreter for a language called Mini-C++ which is almost identical to the Little C interpreter. (Mini-C++ does not even support the "class" keyword, although minimal and artificial support for cin and cout has been added.) The code for Mini-C++ is online, although the book itself is no longer in print.

There is also a BASIC interpreter called Small BASIC in "Turbo C: The Complete Reference", first edition. This implements a minimal version of the historical (i.e. non-Algol, non-structured) BASIC. It uses the same design as Little C.

Starcastle

In addition to his work as a computer scientist, Schildt is the original multi-keyboardist for the progressive rock band Starcastle, appearing on all of the group's albums, most of which were produced from 1976-1978. His style is distinguished by extensive use of Oberheim analog sequencers to create ethereal washes of sound colors, a pioneering technique which was quite cutting-edge for the pre-digital synthesizer period. He is also featured on the band's 2007 album "Song of Times."

Bibliography

* "Advanced Turbo Pascal" (Osborne, 1986)
* "Advanced Modula-2" (Osborne, 1987)
* "Advanced Turbo Prolog 1.1" (Osborne, 1987)
* "Advanced Turbo C" (Osborne, 1987) - foreword by Phillipe Kahn.
* "C: The Complete Reference" (Osborne, 1987)
* "Advanced C" (Osborne, 1988)
* "Turbo C: The Complete Reference" (Osborne, 1988)
* "Born to Code In C" (Osborne, 1989)
* "C: The Complete Reference, 2nd. Ed" (Osborne, 1990)
* "Teach Yourself C, 2nd Ed." (Osborne, 1990) - updated for ANSI C.
* "Teach Yourself C++" (Osborne, 1992)
* "The Annotated ANSI C Standard" (Osborne, 1993)
* "The Art of C++" (Osborne, 2004)
* "Teach Yourself DOS"
* "Beginning Modula-2"
* "Artificial Intelligence in C"
* "Advanced C"
* "Advanced Turbo C"
* "Java: The Complete Reference, 7th Edition (Osborne)

References

External links

* [http://www.herbschildt.com Official website]
* [http://isbndb.com/d/person/schildt_herbert/books.html Full bibliographical details]