Ebook C Programming Language 2nd Edition Brian W Kernighan Dennis M Ritchie Books

Product details Paperback 272 pages Publisher Prentice Hall; 2 edition (April 1, 1988) Language English ISBN-10 0131103628

C Programming Language 2nd Edition Brian W Kernighan Dennis M Ritchie Books Reviews

• I'm not new to programming; in fact I've been doing it professionally for the past decade. Although I've played around in quite a few different languages, most of my work over the last 6 years has been in .NET (C# mainly). I have always had an interest in C because I love its simplicity. Also, it's a language which brings one closer to the machine, stripping away many of the abstractions that higher level languages provide. Higher level languages (such as Java, C#, Python, etc.) are massive and powerful with HUGE frameworks, but I'm attracted to simple things.
  
  This book is a feisty little devil! I had heard of this book before diving in (it is a classic), but its size and table of contents lead me to believe I would breeze right through it. Wrong! Picking up the syntax wasn't too difficult and I have a fairly good handle on more advanced concepts like pointers already, but this book is absolutely packed with exercises and many of them are quite challenging!
  
  Here's one
  "Write a program to check a C program for syntax errors like unbalanced parenthesis, brackets and braces. Don't forget about quotes, both single and double, escape sequences, and comments."
  
  This is a chapter 1 exercise! Chapter 1 is just a tutorial introduction chapter and this is one 1 of 24 exercises in this chapter! No wonder it takes people years to work through this tiny book. I'm only about halfway through as I write this review.
  
  This book is the perfect blend of reference material, practical knowledge and challenging exercises. There is absolutely no fluff and not a single word is wasted. I grow tired of pouring through 1,000+ page tomes. The appendices are also very well structured and extremely helpful.
  
  Although I do virtually no C coding professionally, I can say for certain that this book has leveled up my skill-set. Working through these exercises has helped me with logical thinking and having a better understanding of coding closer to the machine has improved me as a developer overall. I'm one who believes that this book is great for all programmers, even if you never write a line of C after working through this book. I'm really loving the C language!
  
  Whether you are a beginner or experienced it's worth having this book. Though this will be quite tough for total beginners, I say it's still work picking up and pairing it with a more beginner-friendly book. Unfortunately I cannot recommend such a book at this time because this is the only C book I've worked through.
• This book is certainly not for beginners, though not a requirements but at least the reader should have a background on Data Structure in order to easily follow most of the examples. The book was also structured to re-use the functions built from previous chapters like getline, atof, strcmp, alloc, etc.., though some of these functions have an equivalent in C's standard library, the authors choose to re-use it.
  
  If you pay attention to the details on this book, you will pick-up the most important area of C that will save you from scratching your head while debugging your code like side effects of infix/postfix increments, precedence of statement evaluation etc..
  
  The authors also discussed some of the best practices in order to optimize the use of language such as efficient manipulation of pointers, style on delaring variables and initializations. Some of the coding style of this book was also used by coding guidelines found in official website of linux kernel.
  
  This book is commendable not only because it was written by the Kernihan and the creator of the language itself(Richie) but how the book was organized and well explained. This is a small book with big information.
• I cannot explain how important this book is to any programmer, let alone a programmer wanting to learn C. This is one of the first books you should read, when starting any language derived from C as all are nearly syntactically identical.
• I've been programming in C for almost five years now and while that certainly doesn't make me an expert, I was hesitant to by 200-something page book that was essentially an introduction to the language. Well, make no mistake, this book packs more punch pound for pound than any other book I've ever read. Not only was the book not too basic, some of the exercises are taking me way longer than my pride could have imagined. Do not hesitate to buy this book. If you love C, you'll love this book
• Hard to find, but you won't find a better introduction to C programming! The book is easy to read, the example programs actually work, and when I first bought a copy of this book twenty-five years ago, I was able to write a C program to search a very large database and present a nicely structured screen display. Of course, in those days, the program was running under MS-DOS and I didn't have to deal with the Windows API. Nevertheless, Kernighan and Ritchie have written the definitive text for those who wish to learn ANSI C. If you can find one of these, get it!
• C from the fathers of C. This book is esther terse. However, I really like it, and that's is one of the reasons. I cuts right through the chase. It's not your regular academic book which spends 2 chapters to explain functions or loops. Instead it teaches you how to use the language without going around in circles. Although, the book is small, it still has a great deal of content in each of its chapters. Therefore, make sure you have some knowledge of some other programming language under your belt. I rate it 5 stars because it really deserves it. My only complaint is that the book started falling apart in just two weeks. But well it was a used book that looked like new initially.
• This is THE text on C, it's like the Bible for C programming.
  
  I found it to be a great base to ALL other languages I went on to learn - C is like the "father language of the programming world" as many of the pros will tell you.
  
  You can start with this book from absolutely nowhere in C programming, in fact, I think it's better if you do as I felt like I had to "un-learn" many bad habits.
  
  Definitely recommended for everyone by me as it teaches the language to whoever wants to learn C and gives a great base to expand from for anyone who wants to learn other programming languages.