Rating: 
Summary: Too complex for an introductory to File Processing
Review: As a student, I have found this book to inhibit my studies more than help them. Instead of presenting the concepts clearly, concisely and with as little overhead as possible, this author seems to go out of his way to make it harder than it should be. The reader ends up wading through the examples, trying to find the core concept that should have been given up front. This student has discussed this book at length with fellow students, and has yet to find one who enjoys the book. We learn, but only after spending too much time filtering out junk.
Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: Don't even waste your time with this book. It should have never went to print. Bland, dry, boring...it sucks !!! What else can I say???
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth reading
Review: Have you ever wondered how that database you bought works way down in the basement? This book is the place to find out as far as the actual storage on disk is concerned. The book is well-written and well-equipped with glossaries and summaries. Also of note is that the authors make good use of the facilities of C++ for implementing object-oriented access to the file structures. Frankly, I don't expect to actually apply anything I've read in this book in practice. Nevertheless, it was well worth reading -- and in case I need to implement file structures myself, I know where to find the details.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book on file structure concepts, mediocre code
Review: I find the book to present excellent concepts. The method to be used on analysis of file structure problems is explained in great detail. The examples, though, need some rework. There are some errors (not a lot though). With just a few changes, I was able to run and use the code, without any problems. The criticism here seems unjust: following Comer in his book Internetworking (, in which he codes XINU, which I typed in completely and which compiled and ran flawlessly the first time around), I have never found code in books to be without errors of some kind. Another point is, that the modelling methods used for the OO part just might be out-dated. As far as I could see, no specific method was used, neither OMT, UML nor software patterns. I'm not an expert in this field though. A BUY, if you're willing to hack some of the code.
Rating:
Summary: easy to use
Review: i love this book...used it in my file structures course obviously, and i found it very useful
Rating:
Summary: Very nice book
Review: I only bought this book because I needed to get an image of how fixed length records are implemented using C++. The book answered my question and provided me with examples. The examples compiled without a problem. 4 stars instead of 5, because I had to write my own Makefile in order to compile. Aparently, presented makefiles were designed to compile all examples at once, and I only needed a little piece of that. Also, the information is a bit scattered around the book and it is not always easy to find what you need. But it is there, so you just need to work on it. After all, this subject is not covered at all in other books, so I would say it is a must have book for any programmer who works with files.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, no thrills and very practical
Review: I wish more book were of this type: very simple, straight to the point, simple language, and what's most important -- very, very practical. The book is relatively self-contained: you do need to know a bit of C++, but the stress here is on file-based data structures, not C++. Reviewers complaining about typos are correct, but most of them are of a very obvious kind and do not impede study. I think the strongest selling point of this work is the combination of the topic (rarely if ever covered) and practicality. Everyone should read it or at least skim once and then keep it handy -- once in a blue moon you do need to write some on-disk record-managing code, and that book will be your salvation. Again, unlike some academic papers you can find on the net, the book is very simple and practical. Also, at the end of every chapter there's a little section with bibliography, so you know where to go if you need a bit of deeper treatment. I also think there's a newer edition of this book, hopefully it's cleaned up a bit as far as typos go. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to everyone, w/o any reservations. Any beginning/intermediate programmer can buy if straight off the net, no presonal previewing necessary.
Rating:
Summary: Good for concepts, bad for programming...
Review: If you need a book that just covers the concepts, this will do the job well... I used this book in a File Processing Class, and found it was not bad, but I did have to use other sources to actually code the different concepts. Of course this is to be expected unless you use the exact same compiler that the author uses, and since C++ is still "new", even version changes might leave the authors coding examples obsolete... In summary, a good reference book for the concepts, but don't buy it if your looking for concrete examples of the actual code. (In fairness, for me, once I learned the concept, it was not hard to actually program it)..
Rating:
Summary: the other reviews are supremely unfair
Review: It's a very good book, and it covers a very rare topic (I actually don't know of any other similar book--you'd have to hit database-specific sources to get this kind of info.) I haven't touched the code in it, though, so it's possible there are errors, but the conceptual and algorithmic wealth that's contained in the book makes it worth the price (twice over, actually.) So, the reviews are probably correct, but unduly harsh in their criticism, and unfair in stressing some relatively unimportant weaknesses (potentially--I haven't used the code) over the huge overall usefulness of this work. What sucks about it is that bookpool.com doesn't carry it, and therefore you'll have to pay pretty much the sticker price <g>. Still it's worth, I think.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read
Review: It's easy, very clear and fast to read, has good examples and points to many further readings. If you want to know about B-Trees, it's the best place to start. It covers Indexing (primary, secondary, large indexing), B-Trees (B, B+, B*) and Hashing (concepts, extendible hashing). I've read only the Second Edition, wich weren't Object-Oriented (the code was in Pascal/C). This book was used as a major reference in an undergraduate Computer Engineering couse, in a file structure class. I don't know why people are complainig about the code. What are you expecting to learn? For me, concepts about file structures. I think it could be even written in pseudo-code, because the topics were so easy to understand that I've not read any line of code from the book. It was very easy for me to implement the complete code for B and B+ Trees in C based on that text.
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