Essentials of Flowcharting

Rating:
Summary: Without much choice, there is nothing else to choose
Review: Despite the growing mountain of programming code powering personal, mid-range and mainframe computers - not to mention the spreading virus of World Wide Web pages - there are few lessons available on how to flowchart that mountain.

Boilet is a professor at a junior college in the Florida panhandle. He wrote a dozen computer books on software and programming languages inthe last two decades. This slim blue book is 154 pages long and combines programming along with flowcharting in the first three chapters. Only in chapter four, Structured Programming, does the reader get a plate full of charting. Here Boilot digs into the meat of flowcharting, covering flowchart modules like Sequence, Decision, Loop and Selection.

Oddly enough, chapter five starts out withFile Processing, covering much of the basics required before chapter four. He introduces basic definitions and major chart shapes. Chapter 6 deals with arrays and gives flowcharting examples while the appendix gives programming examples and flowcharting exercises. A quick perusal gives brief answers, but little more than that.

Written in 1995, the book does not even mention AS/400s, RPG, C++, JAVA or the Internet. No where does it deal with charting Web page functions, HTML routines or database relationships. Nor does the book deal with flowchart software in any fashion.

Although the best selling charting software on the market today (what is number two?) the Visio manuals do not deal with mid-range or application programming except in a peripheral fashion. It is something that you can glean from the rear view mirror, but it is not what Visio is driving at.

While Visio 200 for Dummies (Debbie Walkowski, 2000, IDG Books Worldwide) is a much better book for learning Visio than the ones that come with the software, this book does not deal directly with system or database flowcharting either. Yet, if you are using Visio for flowcharting, you will find information that is more useful in the "for Dummies" book, than you find in the Essentials of Flowcharting.

In the Visio program folder are a number of flowchart samples (C:\Program Files\Visio\Samples\Flowchart). These help display a variety of charts without telling what they mean or precisely how they were created. Yet, the samples do not cover the same type of system flowcharting that the Essentials book covers. A few basic chart samples of system or database programming in the Visio program, or manuals, and you would not have to peruse the Essentials book at all.

Rating:
Summary: The basic principles are explained
Review: I beg to differ with the other reviewer that blasted this book. But keep in mind this is my personal opinion just as the other reviewers was their opinion. I found the book to be enlighting where other books assumed you knew the basic unlying heart of the subject. Logic, simple algebra and algorithms. Its what I needed, I am a beginner.
Although this is a used book and its a second edition which has references to punch cards which is a thing from computings' past. I got a lot of info to help me grasp the beginning building blocks to programming logic. Which my class text book " Logic and Structured Design for Computer Programers " by Harlod J. Rood for programming logic CIS 168 does not.
This class is supposed to intoduce us to the logic not confuse us, and I find this "Essentials Of Flowcharting" By Boillot, Gleason, and Horn approach to be helpful. It explains things that are assumed you know.
While you will not get any progamming specific info out of this book it will give some of the basics that other books leave out. Like the diffence between a variable and an expression. How a value must be assigned to variable like X before a replacement statement can be can be processed. Thus X=X+2 (to solve you must first be told that X=10) Then X=10+2 can be processed. The value of X after processing is 12 since X+2=10+2=12.And there are lots of simple flow charts to practice tracing or solving.
Accumlation, sums, loops and answers to the flowcharting exercises. Oh a brief bit of BASIC statements.
If your not getting it this book may help you. Or not, its always subjective, it helped me, it may not you. I find I often need a couple books to pick out the parts that increase my understanding of the concepts.And there are lots of simple flow charts to practice tracing or solving.

Rating:
Summary: very good
Review: its a very good book , advise to read it

Rating:
Summary: Sound logic
Review: Someone wiser than us has decided that one should learn how to calculate manually before giving them a calculator. Supposedly this way they have an idea of what goes on in that little black box. Personally I am not interested n how it gets there.

Following this logic, one should know the "Essentials of Flowcharting" before buying ABC Flowchart or its equivalent. Measure twice and cut once. This has lots of practical examples, unlike those toy charts you make at school.