The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie

Recently, I re-discovered “The C Programming Language” by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

I first bought this book soon after it came out in 1988 and, if, like me, you are put off by 500-page volumes that promise to teach you a programming language in 24 hours, or a month, or whatever… you might like it.

Kernighan and Ritchie not only wrote the book, but Ritchie wrote the language, too. So it is nothing if not authoritative. They then went on to revise the language and produce a new edition of the book. So if your grandfather, or aging uncle, offers to lend you a copy of K&R’s first edition, just politely accept and then put it on the shelf for posterity. It’s the second edition, the ANSI version, that you need.

The K&R book is quite short — less than 300 pages — and in two main parts, the first part is a tutorial which covers the main aspects of the language and the second is a series of chapters going into the different parts of the language in much more depth.

The tutorial gives plenty of examples albeit fairly short ones and you can get a pretty good idea of the language just from these 40-odd pages. I was a professional C programmer for several years and the tutorial part was all I needed to get started.