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765

answers:

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I've studied C programming in college some years ago and have developed some medium applications back then (nothing serious). Now I have to develop some more 'advanced' C applications (involving POSIX threads and RPC), but right now I'm a little rusty even with the basics.

Does anyone know of any good online C reference manual? This may help me get in tune faster.

+3  A: 

I got these all from a previous similar question on SO. I would like to credit the original posters, but unfortunately cannot seem to find that question.

Dan
That first link is dead.
Frank V
+2  A: 

For the very basic I found this reference card very useful. Doesn't help with more advanced functions but it can help get the rust off.

acrosman
It did help a lot as a quick reference while programming. Thanks!
Toto
+2  A: 

The best C reference by far is Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" in it's dead tree form. It's compact and complete.

For an online reference, you might try Brian Kernighan's Programming in C Tutorial.

JR Lawhorne
A: 

It's not online, but hands down the best C reference is Harbison & Steele (yeah - it's better than K&R).

You can get the 4th edition for basically shipping (I don't know what improvements were made in the 5th ed.):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0133262243

Michael Burr
JR Lawhorne
Michael Burr
+1  A: 

the C book is freely available on-line. It is not really a reference manual, but still a pretty good resource. From the website:

This is the online version of The C Book, second edition by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran, originally published by Addison Wesley in 1991. This version is made freely available.

While this book is no longer in print, its content is still very relevant today. The C language is still popular, particularly for open source software and embedded programming. We hope this book will be useful, or at least interesting, to people who use C.

Jan de Vos
A: 

I would recommend reading through the comp.lang.c FAQ at least once to help get the rust off. For reference material, you might want to grab a copy of the C Standard, the latest version of C99 with TC3 included is available for free here, for C89 the last draft version is available as a text file or you can pick up a copy of the The Annotated ANSI C Standard for a few bucks and have a hard copy of the actual standard (just ignore the "annotations" on the right-hand pages). Since you are using POSIX you might want to become more familiar with the Single Unix Specification which includes the Standard C library as well as the POSIX functions, you can read/download SUSv3 at the Open Group (registration required but free and quick).

For an offline resource I would also recommend C: A Reference Manual (5th Edition) by Harbison & Steele, it thoroughly covers every language feature and standard function of C and documents differences between the various standard versions.

Robert Gamble
A: 

The best online reference for C and C++ is probably www.cplusplus.com

QuantumPete

QuantumPete
+1  A: 

Don't forget man pages. If you are developing on any UNIX-derived platform (Linux, BSD, Cygwin) you can almost always do something like man printf or info printf to get documentation for any library function.

Frank Szczerba
Make sure you do `man 3 printf` - that one always trips me up.
Chris Lutz
A: 

http://gotapi.com

I always like using http://gotapi.com because it's a one-stop place for, like, everything (and you can contribute another language yourself) (and this is not exclusive):

HTML / CSS / JavaScript AJAX and Frameworks XML / XSL / XPath C, C++, STL Java OpenGL 2.1 PHP Symfony Rails Ruby Python Sicstus Prolog Perl Erlang Adobe / Macromedia ActionScript ColdFusion Tags/Functions Flex 2 Groovy Groovy 1.1 beta 1 - Marc Dexet Drupal CMS Flickr Orb API MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle Java Apache Commons Net JUnit HttpUnit DbUnit Selenium Java2ME

Thr4wn