C Programming FAQs : Frequently Asked Questions

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book. It is one of the three best C books ever!
Review: "C Programming Faqs : Frequently Asked Questions" by Steve Summit is an absolute must have. Not only is Mr. Summit an incredibly talented writer, but the contents are superbly accurate. This is a *very* rare quality in C books. Who can use this book? Anyone from the most raw-boned neophyte to the most incredibly talented expert. The questions in the book are "frequently asked" precisely because they are usually not intuitively obvious and because they do come up frequently in practice. This work is the culmination of many years of effort on the part of one of the most helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable experts on the C language. The book is much more extensive than the on-line C FAQ, and a lot easier to read in book format. I have a copy at my bedside, which is reserved for my true favorites. Buy it!!! That's an order. The rating stops at 5 stars, but if I could, I would give it an entire galaxy.

Rating:
Summary: Great companion
Review: Not intended as a reference or a tutorial for the C language, this book fills one niche well - the gory, often forgotten or differently understood, fine details. When writing code, and noticing some behaviour which doesn't look completely natural, this FAQ can often help clear some things out.
In my opinion it is also good to read it at least once from the beginning - this gives some good insight on the language that might not always be immediately visible to beginners, or intermediate programmers who do not have years of experience behind them.
Most every C compiler these days supports some extensions and non-standard features, and some of those might be difficult to notice as non-standard. This book will also help you program in a more portable manner, and think in more standardized C.

Rating:
Summary: C Programming FAQs
Review: Sir,
I like to read your Book which has special feature such as many ideas, example, explanation with Q & A.

So I kindly request you , sent this book (C Programming FAQs) for free of cost.

I am your favorate fan.

Address:
K. MUNEESWARAN
NO. L1162, 6TH MAIN ROAD,
THIRUVALLLUVAR NAGAR,
THIRUVANMIYUR,
CHENNAI-41
Tamil Nadu,
India

Rating:
Summary: C Programming FAQs
Review: Sir,
I like to read your Book which has special feature such as many ideas, example, explanation with Q & A.

So I kindly request you , sent this book (C Programming FAQs) for free of cost.

I am your favorate fan.

Address:
K. MUNEESWARAN
NO. L1162, 6TH MAIN ROAD,
THIRUVALLLUVAR NAGAR,
THIRUVANMIYUR,
CHENNAI-41
Tamil Nadu,
India

Rating:
Summary: An essential addition to any C programmer's library.
Review: This book gives answers to those annoying problems that always seem to come up in C programming, and which are either not mentioned in the standard texts, or are explained in Standard legalese which is not always comprehensible to the average reader. Both beginning C programmers and seasoned experts will benefit greatly from this book.

It is also arguably the most thouroghly peer-reviewed technical book ever written.

Rating:
Summary: It covers the bases wonderfully!
Review: This book would be a chapter shorter if C didn't have "++", "--", "**", etc. operators, but that's C's fault.

C Programming FAQs explains so many things I've scratched my head at, and shows how to do them properly, and most importantly, portably. Anyone interested in programming C NEEDS this book!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best programming books
Review: This is an essential book for any programmer. I remember buying it when it first came out in Fall 1995. I was an undergraduate senior at the time and thought I was a hotshot C programmer. How mistaken I was! Reading through this book was a humbling experience, as each page showed me fine details of C that I did not already know.

This is an excellent book. It is organised into chapters on different aspects of C, and in each chapter are dozens of FAQs that range from rather common to extremely fine-detailed. Three chapters which I particularly liked were Chapter 1 (declarations and initalisations), 3 (expressions and evaluation order), and 6 (arrays and pointers). Later chapters introduced new (at the time) concepts to me, including getopt, variable-length argument lists, and preprocessor tricks. The level of detail provided in each answer is extraordinary.

Other things I liked about the book: The index is excellent. There is a lot of discussion (spread across the FAQs) on the differences between K&R and ANSI C. (This was relevant to me because at the time, I was splitting my work between gcc and the proprietary cc compilers on DEC Ultrix and SunOS.) The style of writing is friendly and does not talk down to you. This is not a beginners' book!

Note that there is an online version, but it does not have nearly as many questions as in this book.