Monday, April 27, 2009

Erratum (part 1) for D. S. Malik's "Data Structures Using C++"

I am currently taking a Data Structures course at Chabot College. Let's just say I'm aspiring to be a Junior Programmer (only half-kidding...). The course uses the textbook (copyright 2003) mentioned in the title of this post. I realize that no textbook is perfect, but there is at least one error that will have repercussions on the grades of the students that use this text.

In table 5-7 on page 331, the text describing the pop_front method on the STL list container says
Removes the last element from the list.
Unless I'm missing something, this should read "Removes the first element from the list." See also this.

This will have repercussions on student's grades because there is a question in the on-line materials that was directly lifted from this sentence. When I took that quiz I kept getting this question wrong, and couldn't understand why. I then went back and re-read the chapter and saw this.

Caveat Emptor.

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