The Definitive Guide to GCC

GCC continues to evolve and add new flags. Last year it stepped up to C11 and added new optimizations. GCC has FORTRAN and Java compilation capabilities, who knew?. The book covers the best use of Autoconf and Automake with GCC. It also covers using a host of support libaries. There are two section in the Appendix covering the use of specific options.I found this book to be of immense value in giving me an instant expertise in the use of the GCC. I had a dual goal project that required the same code to work on both Linux and Windows. This book gave me the knowledge to make that possible in a relatively short time. My time is worth money, your time should be valuable to. Stop depending on dated website trivia and decade old Linux manuals. Step up to the real world and see what the future can do for you. It's covered in this book.

If your looking for in depth knowledge of GCC the compiler this is the book. It covers multiple opperating systems and multiple versions of GCC. Starting with the history of GCC up to current versions of 4.x. A must read for any C or C++ even Objective-C developers (GCC compiles many more languages). Its a great reference to have in your war chest!

Actually, this book does cover the FORTRAN and Java aspects of GCC for a couple of chapters, but yes it is mostly for C/C++ programmers. Anyway, if you want to learn about all of GCC's different switches, optimization techniques, and warnings then this book has it all. It also covers the "helper" tools like gcov.

Very helpful. I learned a lot about GCC and found this book very readable.

Informative, both basic and more advanced uses. However the plethora of tags that gcc takes can leave you with a headache if you don't know what your looking for. I had hoped there was a chapter on frontend/backend use, and how to build an interface to call GCC. Doesn't get into GAS or GDB at all.

I'm not a big fan of GCC, and I don't think that opensource is the be all and end all. I'll try to be objective and not let my likes and dislikes colour this review.The book seems to have a fairly good coverage of the main languages that GCC supports (C, C++, Java, Fortran, Objective C and Objective C++). I liked the coverage on optimisation and building GCC.Now for some bad points. There is some annoying repetition - we get told far too many times that -pg is not the same as -p -g. The author proseletizes GNU software, and urges us to install GNU sed, awk, tar etc. In particular, I would not recommend GNU tar due to its nonstandard treatment of long filenames. I felt that the chapters on automake, autoconf, libtool and glibc were out of place in a book about a compiler suite. I try to avoid automake, autoconf and libtool (or autohell as they are collectively known as) like the plague as they are slow, unreliable when using platforms/compilers other than Linux/GCC and suffer chronic version dependency problems. I don't see any "amazing beauty" whatsoever (p. 185) in these three tools. I found the occasional digs at platforms such as VMS [which I've never used] somewhat unprofessional.The glibc coverage adds to an overly Linux centric feel to the book (I learnt almost as much about Linux disaster recovery as I learnt about GCC on reading this book).Rather than covering libtool, I would have preferred coverage of GNU ld (with a mention that the system link editor may be used on platforms that don't have GNU ld as the link editor).There is no real comparison of GCC with other compilers. In particular, I think that it should have been mentioned that on platforms where GCC is not the 'native' compiler (Windows, Solaris and HP-UX, for instance), then generally GCC is both much slower at compiling, and compiles object code that runs much slower than the 'native' compiler (much slower being up to a factor of two slower). I've no experience with non-GCC compilers on *BSD and have only used the Intel compiler a few times, so I can't say whether GCC is also poor on home ground.Last annoyance. Whilst I liked the alphabetical listing of options, there is not always a description of the default if no option is specified.

I found this book to be very helpful when I need to look up gcc command line options.

Poor description of GCC. Lots of duplicate descriptions and is out of date.