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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Recomendations needed for a book to
Message-ID: <82400057@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 89 01:38:38 GMT
Article-I.D.: p.82400057
References: <16945@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
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Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Nov 17 01:39:00 1989


"C: A Reference Manual"  By Harbison & Guy Steele

I think this is a better reference than Kernighan & Ritchie.  The
authors have implemented far more C compilers than Kernighan &
Ritchie.  I was amazed to learn new things from this book, after ten
years of C programming (using Kernighan & Ritchie's first edition).


One flaw with Kernighan & Ritchie, 1st edition: It's hard to find the
answer to a question, using the index.  Information is scattered all
over the book.  This makes it a rather poor (although definitive)
reference, in my opinion.

Kernighan & Ritchie, 1st edition, is slightly deceptive.  As examples,
they use nearly *every* artful piece of compact code from UNIX.  This
is misleading -- it makes C seem like a miraculously simple language.
Real C programs are a great deal more complicated than these contrived
examples.