There are lots of introductory C books, but this is the first one that has the no-nonsense, practical approach that has made Nutshell Handbooks(R) famous. C programming is more than just getting the syntax right. Style and debugging also play a tremendous part in creating programs that run well and are easy to maintain. This book teaches you not only the mechanics of programming, but also describes how to create programs that are easy to read, debug, and update. Practical rules are stressed. For example, there are fifteen precedence rules in C (&& comes before || comes before ?:). The practical programmer reduces these to two:

• Multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction.

Contrary to popular belief, most programmers do not spend most of their time creating code. Most of their time is spent modifying someone else's code. This books shows you how to avoid the all-too-common obfuscated uses of C (and also to recognize these uses when you encounter them in existing programs) and thereby to leave code that the programmer responsible for maintenance does not have to struggle with. Electronic Archaeology, the art of going through someone else's code, is described. This third edition introduces popular Integrated Development Environments on Windows systems, as well as UNIX programming utilities, and features a large statistics-generating program to pull together the concepts and features in the language.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 50 Ratings

Perfect for beginners, but recommend a second book! - 2006-02-08
Reviewer Rating:
First of all, this book was absolutely wonderful. It did a very good job teaching me how to write C with very little knowledge of the language. However, there were some things that the author did (and skipped over) that are cleared up in "The C Programming Language", by Dennis Ritchie. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who doesn't have very much knowledge of C, because the writing style is clear and easy to follow. The author, for the most part, does a great job of explaining difficult concepts in an easy to understand manner; such as linked lists and trees. Once again, I would recommend another book as a follow up, such as "Expert C Programming".

Actually 3 1/2 Stars - 2009-02-24
Reviewer Rating:
Well, first off I'd like to mention I am not a programmer, and actually come from more of an engineering discipline. I'm not totally new to programming concepts having done work with assembly language along with some basic unix shell scripting tasks in the past.

I picked up this book primarily because I was looking to learn more about the internals of unix systems but needed a primer on the C language first.

For me, the book wasn't very engaging. It is technically correct, but throughout the text I felt there was simply something missing that failed to keep me wanting to read it. Apologies in advance if other readers feel I am being vague or too subjective, but in reality it may have a lot more to do with the way I tend to personally learn, and the particular writing style this author has. Again, I remind those reading this review of my stated purpose for picking this book up in the first place: that is, priming myself on the fundamentals of the C language.

The book itself has a neo-textbook feel in that it provides programming exercises throughout the book to practice on the concepts touched upon. There are also helpful diagrams and figures that help explain subjects such as arrays and stacks.
Overall a decent piece of work.

Personally, I feel for the way I tend to learn new information, the book C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie is going to be my goto book for continuing to learn this amazing programming language.
For me, this book has a cleaner flow to it but readers totally new to programming in general might want to have a look at Practical C as it may better suit them.

File Creation! - 2006-05-18
Reviewer Rating:
This book starts off very strong and the author is very clear and concise. I learned alot... but then something happens... the author decides to wait for covering floats until after he covers File I/O and he rushes through that. I was completely left hanging with not one example of writing data to a file and the author expected me to be able to complete an exercise in which I need to write data to a file. After this...the next chapter back tracks to covering Floats... which should have been covered previously with the other data types.

Not good enough to be stand alone book but 2 stars for effort - 2010-01-27
Reviewer Rating:
I could find better stuff just looking around the internet. I could see the author put alot of work into it but is not a good instructor. I'm sure he understands C but as for teaching it that is another story. I was hoping it would be good beginner book but in my opinion it is not. It starts off with the basic stuff all right but the author expects you to jump from point a to point g without explaining b,c,d,e, and f. I mean ok sure the first few chapters get you interested and your thinking it's going to teach you the ground work on programming but it falls really short. Then it just jumps into more complicated stuff and the complicated stuff just isn't very good. There are not many examples and I think that is the heart of programming. If your going to learn you have to build up with easy programs and then get into the difficult stuff. Well I'm off on my search for better books. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

great for self-learners - 2006-08-03
Reviewer Rating:
For anyone who has suffered through trying to read a beginners book on C only to end up getting lost half way through, you will find this book a huge relief. This book stresses things like how code so from a perspective of communicating logically. And how to comment thoroughly so their is no doubt what the code does. This is not the end all book on C, so you will want to move on to more advanced books on C after this one.

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