Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2619 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 274 pages

Amazon.com
Just about every C programmer I respect learned C from this book. Unlike many of the 1,000 page doorstops stuffed with CD-ROMs that have become popular, this volume is concise and powerful (if somewhat dangerous) -- like C itself. And it was written by Kernighan himself. Need we say more?

Book Info
Describes C as defined by the ANSI standard. Meant to help the reader learn how to program in C. Examples included. Paper. DLC: C (Computer program language)

The publisher, Prentice-Hall ECS Professional
This second editon describes C as defined by the ANSI standard. This book is meant to help the reader learn how to program in C. The book assumes some familiarity with basic programming concepts like variables, assignment statements, loops, and functions. A novice programmer should be able to read along and pick up the language.

Customer Reviews

The Must-have
I've read the first edition, and this is a must. It doesn't cover some of the details of ISO/ansi 99, but those can be found elsewhere. What can't be found is the way the authors drag even the beginning student right into the depths of memory allocation so soon. This book isn't too easy, but it's one no student of c can be without, and it's well-written, into the bargain.

Great Book
Most people that are serious about C know about this book, often calling it "K & R" or "The Old Testament." As the authors of this book are also the authors of the C language itself, it's kinda hard to find a "better" book on the subject. The first edition has some errors that were (hopefully) fixed in the 2nd edition.
If you are new to programming, or have only used Windows, you may be a little lost as this holds true to the UNIX methodology of doing one thing well, and that is to teach C. It doesn't bother with helping to teach editor tools and compilers, or even basic programming concepts, as those are out of scope and the intended audience already knows about those.

This is a great book, and I wish more books on programming languages had the same approach to teaching syntax and its use.

The defacto book on C

This book is extremely well written but it moves very fast. It is a short read so in order to get the most out of it you'll need to read then re-read much of it. Also, actually doing the examples and excercises will get you that much closer to knowing the C language intimately.

I know that this book was written a long time ago and the fact that it still holds up is pretty amazing. It is somewhat dated in terms of the typography and layout in fact it's not the easiest book to read visually.

If you are brand new to programming you'll definately want to start out with a different book. This book is not a friendly intro to programming but more of an expert essay on the C language.

Two things that really bother me: This book has some Unix based exercises toward the end so you'll need to get a copy of Cygwin (a unix environment that runs on Windows) if you are running a Windows based operating system to complete the excercizes. The next thing which bothers me even more is there is almost little to no material on dynamic memory. It skims over the use of keywords like "malloc" and some of the examples which use dynamic memory don't handle memory cleanup at all. In fact there's almost no mention of cleaning up after yourself after you've requested memory using "malloc" I find this disturbing because to be effective at dynamic memory management which is a foundational concept in C you have to understand how important it is to be responsible about requesting memory from the OS and then "free"ing it once you are done with it. Again, the material on this subject is very thin.

But, aside from that...if you are a C programmer it's almost a given that you own this book.

Trivia: Ever wondered where the "Hello World" statement came from? This book is it! ;)