Rating: 
Summary: The best C reference book available.
Review: This book is great. It is well organized, extremely accurate, and covers every case that can occur in the C language. Ever wonder what happens if ..., well, this book talks about it! A wonderful reference manual that deserves to be on everyone's desk. If you write C, you want this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference for any C programmer
Review: This book is the best quick reference for looking up functions, include files and the like. I recommended it to the serious C-philes in my programming class last quarter
Rating:
Summary: Better than K&R (is that posible ?)
Review: This book may actually be better than K&R. They share the same style in that explinations of language features are done in the context of great and useful code. for{} loops used to implement an integer power function (3-7 X faster than pow(), integer powers only), and optimized shell sort two pages later. The list goes on and on. It amazes me how much better really great books are than average books. I have been programming in C about 10 years now, didn't really need another C book and bought it just for library completeness. In spite of this I STILL love this book and feel very lucky to have found it. After chasing MicroSlop's alphabet soup around (MFC, ATL, BaseCtl, blah, blah ad nauseum...) I didn't think I'd ever be WOW'ed by a plain old C book again, but WOW, this is a really great book. It demonstrates all over again that as simple a language as C is, you can do anything in it if you are creative and insightfull. An amazing and wonderfull book!
Rating: 
Summary: A good reference book on ANSI C; many examples
Review: This is a good reference on ANSI standard C, although I
wouldn't try to start learning the language from it. Either
Harbison or Steele or both were on the committee that set
the standard, and they often describe *why* a feature was
included in the language. There are also examples of using
and mis-using most parts of the language, and points about
writing for clarity and letting the (modern) compiler
optimize for speed.
Rating:
Summary: A good reference book on ANSI C; many examples
Review: This is a good reference on ANSI standard C, although I wouldn't try
to start learning the language from it. Either Harbison or Steele or
both were on the committee that set the standard, and they often
describe *why* a feature was included in the language. There are also
examples of using and mis-using most parts of the language, and points
about writing for clarity and letting the (modern) compiler optimize
for speed. New in the 4th edition are some brief discussions of C++
compatability (e.g. differences in scoping of some declarations).
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent text but inadequate index
Review: This is a very complete book, but unfortunately, I have found its index to be inadequate. Several times now, I have gone looking in the index for something, and couldn't find it. More persistent searching throught the table of contents and the text showed that the item was in fact there. Here's a blatant example: "const" has no entry in the index. This, despite the fact that section 4.4.4 on page 89 is called "4.4.4 Const" and the book devotes the next 2 pages to the use of "const". Similar sounding entries in the index (e.g. constants, etc.) do not refer you to this page anywhere. That's simply unbelievable that the heading of a section does not appear in the index.
Rating:
Summary: my choice for a desert island
Review: This is absolutely the best book on the C language I've ever seen. The coverage is complete and detailed, the appendices accurarately and succinctly detail the ANSI standard C libraries. Basically, if you're writing C code, you need this book. It's displaced K&R on my desk as my C reference; it's easier to read and better organized.Be forewarned, this is not a tutorial. It's aimed at someone who already knows the language, and needs a detailed description for those nagging questions you can't answer anyplace else.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Book on C
Review: This is absolutely the best book on the C language I've ever seen. The coverage is complete and detailed, the appendices accurarately and succinctly detail the ANSI standard C libraries. Basically, if you're writing C code, you need this book. It's displaced K&R on my desk as my C reference; it's easier to read and better organized. Be forewarned, this is not a tutorial. It's aimed at someone who already knows the language, and needs a detailed description for those nagging questions you can't answer anyplace else.
Rating:
Summary: The name speaks for it
Review: This should be your second book on C programming (the first is The C programming language, of course). As the name says, this is a "reference manual". Don't believe that you can learn C from this book, as it just lists out the syntax, data types, library call, etc, but will not teach you what recursion, structured programming, etc are. You will be familar with C more after you read this book.
Rating:
Summary: hands down, the best c reference manual
Review: this text will not teach you c. in fact, you need to be familiar with fundamental coding practices and theory before taking on this book. this book is exactly what its name implies, and that is a reference manual. it is hands down the best reference manual on c out there. if you need to understand a particular aspect of the c language (but not how to code) this book *will* help you. if i can't find what i'm looking for in the man page i turn to my trusty c:arm. the reference is clear, concise, and perhaps even terse. it is not bogged down by inadequate flowery language or contrived examples. the reference topics include lexicon, the preprocessor, declarations, types, conversions, expressions, statements, functions, and the standard c libraries. the reference topics for the standard libraries include language additions, character and string processing, memory, i/o, storage, mathematic, time and date, control, and other miscellaneous functions. do not leave your cubicle w/o this book.
|
