Rating: 
Summary: my first and only good book on C
Review: This book really delineates the outset of my career as a software engineer. I'd hacked around with pascal, basic, and assembly language, but had heard a lot of good things about C. I wasted my time with several other books on C, but never made much progress until I found "good 'ol K&R" (i.e. this book).It's a true classic that stands the test of time and is probably the only book on C you'll ever need. It has also served as a useful benchmark - since this book I regard any thicker book on a programming language as one or both of the following: a sign of a bad language; a sign of a bad book. I also recommend O'Reilly's "POSIX Programmer's Guide" as an excellent reference to the STANDARD system programming libraries for C.
Rating:
Summary: The standard.
Review: This book is the standard - a must own if you write code in C. While not a masterpiece in terms of its prose or style, it's got the facts, it's small, tight, and condensed. What more do you need in a reference book? Nothing.
Rating:
Summary: A great place to start.
Review: Anyone that's ever touched a programming language that wants to learn C should start here. Especially all of you recent additions to the UNIX/Linux world -- buy it now, pass it on to someone else later.
Rating:
Summary: *bow* were not worthy *bow*
Review: The bible of today's basic programming concepts, I must have read this over and over and over and over again a few thousand times, this is not just my favourite programming book, its my FAVOURITE book, ([name]seconds it), if youre into computer programming you must have this book.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable...even for beginners!
Review: Out of all the books I have read...this one deserves 6 stars! I picked up several books on C at the local library in an attempt to learn the language. After reading several books that made "War and Peace" seem small, I picked this one up from the stack. In a little over 200 pages, the authors ahd explained C in a way that all the others failed. They approach C from a no-nonsense way and explain it in simple, easy to understand language. I have sense purchased my own copy, and I noticed that every coder at work has this book readily at hand. Other books tend to miss the mark when it comes to C, and some of them won't even attempt to explain pointers, arrays and structures. One book I had refered me to this book for a better explaination! These guys invented C, so its the best thing short of having them as a personal teacher!
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely essential for learning/using C
Review: I've been programming for a little over a year now, I've had two (very light) semesters of C++, and I use perl quite a bit as well. I came to this book looking to get a solid foundation with C before pursuing my interests in compiler design and computer graphics programming. The examples, I thought, were a bit more plausible than in many other programming books, and infact many are (sometimes scaled down) equivalents of standard library functions. Moreover, the examples are very elegantly written, and get you thinking about clever ways to exploit this languages syntax. Some of the concepts in this book are so dense (sometimes unrealistically, but for good reason), I would stare at the same few lines of code trying to decipher what it meant. But that's what helped my C-contemplating brain-cells grow, and now I can decipher the meaning of many convoluted C statements very quickly. I also thought 'Programming Perl' was a great programming book also, and I sometimes wonder if the popularity of these languages can be at least partially attributed to having great texts like this to learn them from.
Rating:
Summary: Best learned from the source
Review: C programmers will find themselves needing other books, but this one is a must-have for everyone who uses the language. Unlike the refrigerator-sized goliaths that promise to teach C to the reader in under 30 seconds, this book is small, concise, and can probably teach the language faster than any other. Its index allows for easy quick reference to the seasoned C programmer. The authors are the de facto authoritative source on the subject, and this book should serve as a model to all writers of technical books.
Rating:
Summary: best book on C
Review: Any serious C programmer should own this book. It may not be you first book in C if you have never programmed before (even then I suggest you try to start with this book, it definitely pays off). This book is comprehensive and straight to the point. And very accurate -- you'd be amazed by how many C books out there that are just plain wrong, either because the authors don't know what they are talking about or they bend the concepts to make them more accessible -- always a bad idea. First part of the book is a tutorial-style introduction to the C language. Definitely read each chapter more than once if you are just learning to program. The exercises are excellent, and answers are provided in a separate volume. Even if you solve the problem, still take a look at the answers. You pick up clear and efficient style by looking at good code. Remember some of the subtlties talked about in the book you will not get until you are much more experienced with C. Get this book. It's expensive, but worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Accept no substitutes
Review: Boy, does this book ever take me back. The first edition of this book was the first book about computers I had ever read. I had an Apple IIe, a C development environment (on 6 floppy disks, which had to be swapped in and out while building), and was trying to teach myself to program. I mostly understood what I was reading - until I got to the section about pointers, which I found incomprehensible. I just couldn't figure it out, until I was reading another book about the Apple II, which explained how the video system worked - then I got the idea that if I took a pointer and set it to video buffer, I could change what was displayed on the screen. Voila, it worked, and I was started on a profession that lasted to this day. I still have that first edition, and years later, in 1988, when the second edition was published, I bought that. Well, there hasn't been a third edition, nor has one been needed. C is essentially a finished product. It does what it was made to do, which was to fill a role that didn't exist at the time of its creation, a language that could be used for both systems and applications programming. At that time assembly language was used for systems programming, and languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, or Pascal were used for applications programming. C could be used for both, and the rift between systems programming languages and applications programming languages was healed, at least until recently (applications programming has largely migrated to C++, while systems programming is still largely done in C). If you want to do systems programming, you just need to learn C. But what if you want to do applications programming? Is it still worth your while to learn C? Well, yes. Here are some reasons why: First, C++ (and Java too, for that matter) are derived from C and are easier to learn once you know C - in fact, C++ is essentially a superset of C, to learn C++ you need to learn pretty much all of C anyway. Second, there are still a lot of C programs around, it is handy to be able to work on them should the need arise. Third, programming examples pretty much everywhere are routinely written in C. Fourth, C is just a neat language in its own right in which to write code; it is small and easy to learn, lends itself to small, fast code, and is available in almost every development environment. So, if you are going to learn C, should you get this book? For the first edition, the answer was easy because the book at that time not only taught people to program the language, it was the authoritative definition of the language - you would have been foolish to attempt to learn the language without it. For this edition, that is not necessarily true - in fact, the book cover now refers to "ANSI C", as ANSI has taken over defining the language standard, which the first edition of this book had formerly filled. In one sense, "K & R", as it has been known through the years, is now just another book about C. But in another sense, this book still is C - you can put the first edition and this one side by side (I have both before me now - the first edition is battered and worn, but otherwise very like the second), and be amazed at how similar the two are. Not many changes were made to the language definition between the two editions (all of them good ones), so there was little need to rewrite because of content changes. Most of the changes were for clarity - the chapter on pointers, which gave me so much trouble so many years ago, was the only one completely re-done for the second edition and is much the better for it. So what does this book have that other C programming books do not? Authority. History. Community. The creator of the language wrote this book. For over two decades programmers have learned the language from this book. This is the book that you are more likely to share with other programers than any other. In sum, if you are interested in learning C programming, it should be an easy decision to go ahead and get this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Only Essential C Book
Review: The first time software development ever really scared me was working through the exercises in this book on my old XT clone. I discovered that I "thought" in C already. The language packaged the constructs which I had been translating into FORTRAN at work. I already knew Pascal, FORTRAN, BASIC, and assembler, so I wasn't a virgin programmer. But The C Programming Language turned my life around--it handed me a language which naturally mapped to the way I thought through programming problems. Working the exercises in this book not only taught me the C language, but it also tightened up my programming style. The book begins in a non-threatening manner, and walks the reader through the basics of software creation in C. From the simple, classic "hello world" program to useful utilities, this book makes software creation seem easy. It teaches not only the C language, but also the discipline of writing quality code.
| 
