I am just another GNU-Linux activist and enthusiast. This is my first try at contributing something towards the GNU-Linux community.

When I first started writing tidbits of c-code using GCC, the celebrated GNU-compiler-collection, I can remember my excitement. It seemed like a store of excitement, so much easily available in any GNU-Linux Distribution, but hardly appreciated or used by my co-students during my course in B-Tech or M-Tech in Science College, Calcutta University.

So, later, when I got some time of my own, working under TCS, the first thing that occurred to me was give some practical compiling examples using GCC. The idea of Port-a-Book was put forward by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, a comrade in my GNU-Linux activism, from the time of GLT, Madhyamgram. The other people who took very active interest in it were Dipankar Das and Sayamindu Dasgupta. In fact, I am grateful to Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay and Sayamindu Dasgupta for providing me some space on the Randomink server where I can upload all these things.

The idea of Port-a-book was to take a popular textbook, popular among the Indian student community, books that I myself read during my student years, and compile all the pieces of code in it using GCC.

Naturally, my first choice was Programming with C, Second Edition, by Byron Gottfried, Tata McGraw-Hill, Delhi, 2006. This is one of the books that are so vastly used by Indian students, students like me. So, it occurred to me, it will be so very helpful for students to get all the problems and examples given in this book compiled in a FLOSS environment, using GCC.

I am personally so much indebted to Dipankar Das, maybe it is so funny to express, actually for all the regular abuses that he shared on me, about not completing the book in time.

So here is my work, spanning over some six months, geographically which started in Mumbai, and now, I upload it, after completing it in Kolkata.

Gottfried pieces of code in GCC




PS: This zip file includes all the problems and examples, Chapter Five onwards, from the book. I have checked, compiled and run them on an Ubuntu 7.04 system, under gcc version 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4). A few of the problems I could not complete. Later I am going to give here an exhaustive list of them.


Debasish Das
d79das at gmail dot com