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C Programming Language (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software) (Paperback)
by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
| Category:
C language, Computer programming, Language & tools, Computer science |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Classic, bestselling introduction that teaches the language and illustrates useful algorithms, data structures and programming techniques. |
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Author: Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 2 edition
Pub. in: April, 1998
ISBN: 0131103628
Pages: 274
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.9 x 0.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01589
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0131103627
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Rate this product:
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- Awards & Credential -
A masterpiece in its field and an all-time bestseller. |
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- MSL Picks -
It is difficult to avoid cliches when talking about this book - it is just so good, that one can't help heaping superlatives on it.
This book is affectionately known as 'K & R', after the names of the authors, and it is almost definitely the most widely respected of all books on any given programming language.
This is the book that introduced the 'Hello World!' program to the world :-), which is now practically a standard first program in any introductory book on any programming language.
This is straight from the creators, and the implied authority, while an excellent reason in itself for taking a look at the book, pales in comparison to its other merits - brevity & clarity being foremost.
This book is best appreciated if you already have some programming background - i say this from experience, since i knew Fortran 77 & Pascal before i learnt C, and the knowledge of Pascal, in particular,made it much easier for me to pick up C than classmates for whom it was the first programming language.
Of course, if you're new to programming, you could still try learning from this, but it might be a bit of a struggle. If so, the books by Kelley & Pohl, K.N.King or Gottfried(Schaum series) may be useful for 'getting upto speed' with C first, and then coming to K & R.
C is the one language which is both 'high level' and 'low level' at the same time - to date, it is the nearest to the ideal of a programming language that is easy enough in description to be followed by human readers, and at the same time close enough to the machine's language to be executed fast.There are faster languages, to be sure - assembly language is necessarily faster than any high level language. But just try coding a reasonably involved program in assembly, or even reading such an effort ! There are other languages which might be 'easier' for people to read, but they are slower(C++,Java,etc,etc).
It is also the 'mother' of all modern biggies - C++ owes even its very name to C, Java was derived from C++, and Perl is **written** in C !!
So knowing C would give you a better appreciation of the other languages as well.
And it's still the language of choice for systems programming - so no systems programmer can afford to be a non-expert at C.
Anyway, back to the book - and what a book it is! The authors are not just great programmers, they are outstanding writers as well.
The book is just 274 pages, but it will teach you more than most thick 'tomes' on programming could ever possibly teach.
And no, that doesn't imply that it's 'dense' or abtruse. The authors choose their words judiciously, and there is not a word out of place.The book is designed to make you think, for there is no better way of learning than to think things out for yourself.
Reading the carefully worded text and working out the compact examples will teach you a lot - if you can go through all the exercises, well then you'll surely be an expert when you finish the book. I never did, but i learnt enough to implement several projects in C over the past six years, right from searching and sorting to cryptography and speech recognition.
The examples in this book are a thing of beauty (and therefore a joy forever!!). Elegance, in one word.
It has that universal characteristic of a great book - no matter how many times you read it, you'll learn something new.
You may buy several other books for specialized purposes of particular projects, but when you want to get into the nitty-gritty, to clarify any elusive points, you'll return here, to 'the word of the law', as laid out by the creators of the language.
Basically, if you program in C, you've just got have this book - and once you have it, you'll find it indispensable.
Target readers:
Computer science students and programmers.
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Brian W. Kernighan works in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is Consulting Editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series and the author, with Dennis Ritchie, of The C Programming Language.
Dennis Ritchie is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix.
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From Publisher
This book is meant to help the reader learn how to program in C. It is the definitive reference guide, now in a second edition. Although the first edition was written in 1978, it continues to be a worldwide best-seller. This second edition brings the classic original up to date to include the ANSI standard. From the Preface: We have tried to retain the brevity of the first edition. C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book. We have improved the exposition of critical features, such as pointers, that are central to C programming. We have refined the original examples, and have added new examples in several chapters. For instance, the treatment of complicated declarations is augmented by programs that convert declarations into words and vice versa. As before, all examples have been tested directly from the text, which is in machine-readable form. As we said in the first preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way. We hope that this book will help you to learn C and use it well.
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Preface
The computing world has undergone a revolution since the publication of The C Programming Language in 1978. Big computers are much bigger, and personal computers have capabilities that rival the mainframes of a decade ago. During this time, C has changed too, although only modestly, and it has spread far beyond its origins as the language of the UNIX operating system.
The growing popularity of C, the changes in the language over the years, and the creation of compilers by groups not involved in its design, combined to demonstrate a need for a more precise and more contemporary definition of the language than the First edition of this book provided. In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a committee whose goal was to produce "an unambiguous and machine-independent definition of the language C," while still retaining its spirit. The result is the ANSI standard for C.
The standard formalizes constructions that were hinted at but not described in the first edition, particularly structure assignment and enumerations. It provides a new form of function declaration that permits cross-checking of defini-tion with use. It specifies a standard library, with an extensive set of functions for performing input and output, memory management, string manipulation, and similar tasks. It makes precise the behavior of features that were not spelled out in the original definition, and at the same time states explicitly which aspects of the language remain machine-dependent.
This second edition of The C Programming Language describes C as defined by the ANSI standard. Although we have noted the places where the language has evolved, we have chosen to write exclusively in the new form. For the most part, this makes no significant difference; the most visible change is the new form of function declaration and definition. Modern compilers already support most features of the standard.
We have tried to retain the brevity of the first edition. C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book. We have improved the exposition of critical features, such as pointers, that are central to C programming. We have refined the original examples, and have added new examples in several chapters. For instance, the treatment of complicated declarations is augmented by programs that convert declarations into words and vice versa. As before, all examples have been tested directly from the text, which is in machine-readable form.
Appendix A, the reference manual, is not the standard, but our attempt to convey the essentials of the standard in a smaller space. It is meant for easy comprehension by programmers, but not as a definition for compiler writersÑ that role properly belongs to the standard itself. Appendix B is a summary of the facilities of the standard library. It too is meant for reference by programmers, not implementers. Appendix C is a concise summary of the changes from the original version.
As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way. We hope that this book will help you to learn C and to use it well.Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. RitchiePreface to the First Edition
C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than
supposedly more powerful languages.
C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating sys-tem on the DEC PDP-1 1, by Dennis Ritchie. The operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX applications programs (including all of the software used to prepare this book) are written in C. Production compilers also exist for several other machines, including the IBM System/370, the Honeywell 6000, and the Interdata 8/32. C is not tied to any particular hardware or system, however, and it is easy to write programs that will run without change on any machine that supports C.
This book is meant to help the reader learn how to program in C. It contains a tutorial introduction to get new users started as soon as possible, separate chapters on each major feature, and a reference manual. Most of the treatment is based on reading, writing and revising examples, rather than on mere statements of rules. For the most part, the examples are complete, real programs, rather than isolated fragments. All examples have been tested directly from the text, which is in machine-readable form. Besides showing how to make
effective use of the language, we have also tried where possible to illustrate useful
algorithms and principles of good style and sound design.
The book is not an introductory programming manual; it assumes some familiarity with basic programming concepts like variables, assignment statements, loops, and functions. Nonetheless, a novice programmer should be able to read along and pick up the language, although access to a more knowledgeable colleague will help.
In our experience, C has proven to be a pleasant, expressive, and versatile language for a wide variety of programs. It is easy to learn, and it wears well as one's experience with it grows. We hope that this book will help you to use it well.Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie. |
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Mike Christie (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-23 00:00>
This book (widely known as K&R, after the authors' initials) has for over twenty years been the best way to learn C. When I got this book in 1980, I had access to a Unix system and worked through much of the tutorial material in it. On the way I learnt a great deal, not just about C, but about good programming style, code reuse, the value of clear comments - in short, I was introduced to the skill set of an experienced computer professional.
The book was a trendsetter in several ways. For example, the very first exercise given is to print "hello, world"; this is now seen as the first exercise in innumerable other, more recent books, many of which may not realize that they are borrowing from K&R. The rest of chapter 1 (there's a chapter 0, an introduction; another geek-cool change which has been widely copied) is a tutorial that takes you through assignment statements, data types, if/else, for, while, printf, function definitions, arrays, and variable scoping, in less than 30 pages. If you work your way through the embedded exercises you'll have written utilities to strip tabs, reverse input by lines, strip trailing whitespace from input, and several others. This is much more challenging than most tutorials, but the effect on the student is that you feel you are being treated as an equal. The book doesn't talk down to you; it gives you accurate and concise answers. It's written for programmers, in other words.
The next few chapters go back over the elements of C in more detail, and should also be treated as a tutorial. Going through this material religiously will be far more valuable than any college class could possibly be.
There is a reference section at the back, which is good to have. But the real value of this book is in the tutorial approach: it is a rare pleasure in the computing field to find a book that is simultaneously clear, stimulating and informative. |
Bowen Simmons (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-23 00:00>
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. |
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