Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > There is an ongoing thread on comp.lang.c.moderated that started when > someone posted a question about the best book to learn C from. He was > told to figure out first what it was he wanted to do with (in?) C. The > OP said he had a very good idea what he wanted, and that he was not a > total novice in programming, and not as clueless as was (in his > opinion) implied. Then he was told that the people who had answered > him (and there are some luminaries there) didn't know what he wanted, > and having hundreds of C books on their bookshelves and having written > extensive reviews on dozens of them, they still could not give a > specific recommendation without further specific info. At the same > time, they know way too much to just recommend K&R and be done with it. > > That's the difficulty. You want the right tool for your specific > needs. In order to do that, you need to specify your needs, and then > google or otherwise look for recommendations based on your specific > criteria. I am no expert in the particular area you are interested in, > but I would venture a guess that it is just as difficult to give a > catch-all recommendation there as in any other field.
As I wrote (and others, as Ira, repeated) we are talking about a comparison with various criterions. So in the case of a database, there will be a row (in the table) called "transactions", with a "V" for PostgreSQL and a "0.5" for MySQL. With detailed comparisons, everybody can choose the right tool for his needs. > And asking for a > web site that would deliver what you want is asking for a group of > trustworthy, meaning both highly competent and incorruptible, people > with wide enough area of expertise to cover a range of criteria. Not > that it's impossible, but it strikes me as a very difficult task. PC Magazine, for example, has done a great job for years, with 22 annual comparisons, per year. One of those comparisons, repeated any year, compared all the printers that were announced that year (more than 100 PER YEAR). These comparisons covered almost anything you can imagine. They were very objective, although some of the competitors advertised in PC-Magazine. > If it is a strategic decision for you and/or your company, maybe it > will pay to do the research yourself. You have a very good head start <cynic> Let's go forward: if it's strategic, maybe it will pay to develop it from scratch! </cynic> The same decisions have to be done by MANY companies and organizations, and it's impossible to repeat this effort per company and per an area. > already. You know of a wide range of products that fit the general > description. This is much more than most people start with. List your > criteria, search for information about each product and try to grade > them based on each criterion. Such comparative tables do help. If > nothing else, it will clarify quite a few things for you, and will > help you make informed decisions. You can't just "harvest" details from the Internet and build a check list; You should try all of the choices in order to get a decision. This is the only way to decide which of them is really the easiet. And which of them is really the fastest. But this forces you to download and install all of them learn all of them, etc. So it makes sense that there will be a site expertizing in doing these comparisons, rather than any of us reinventing the wheel. -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
