scientific article; zbMATH DE number 194125
The objective of this book is to teach the topic of the file processing in a systematic manner in a Pascal environment. PASCAL, with its support for relative files, gives a possibility to study external data structures in a continual process with basic courses of programming in PASCAL. From that point of view, PASCAL appears to be a more pedagogical tool than, e.g., COBOL or PL/1, which have built-in support for direct access and index sequential access. The book contains nine very detailed chapters covering on 439 pages five basic themes: (1) File processing environment, (2) Sequential access, (3) Random access, (4) Tree-structured file organization, and (5) List- structured file organization. First four chapters give an introduction to file processing. For example, the notions as blocking and buffering are discussed and parameters of external storage devices are described. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to the sequential file organization and to external sort/merge algorithms, which are compared for efficiency in numerous examples. Chapter 7 - Relative file organization handles various approaches to the random access into files. Well-known hashing functions are compared on detailed examples, theoretical results are also given. (Unfortunately, the linear probing contains a conceptual mistake in the method for an unsuccessful search.) Tree-structured organizations are represented in chapters 8 and 9 by B- trees and an index-sequential file organization. Chapter 8 covers also height-balanced binary trees (AVL trees). The index-sequential approach includes here two implementations: SIS files (CDC computers), ISAM and VSAM files (IBM computers). The last chapter 10 covers the topic of multiple-key file organization. Included in this chapter is a discussion of inverted files and multilists files to provide access by several keys. The book is equipped by many useful pedagogical tools such as case studies illustrating practical problems of a files usage. A variety of examples and detailed algorithms in PASCAL-like pseudocode accompany all explained methods. Exercises make it possible to test the students' knowledge and to extend the material of particular chapters. The glossary at the end of the book summarizes basic notions used in the text. This is a well-structured textbook, valuable for all basic courses of the file processing.
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