What are some good resources for learning C beyond K&R

Question

Hi,

I'm currently reaching the end of working through the K&R book "The C Programming Language", and I'm looking for things to read next.

Any recommendations of:

• blogs
• more detailed / advanced books (I've already stuck Advanced Programming in a Unix Environment on my Safari bookshelf)
• open source code (beginner-friendly and with good C idioms or style)

to read up on next would be gratefully appreciated. To be specific, I'm most interested in things relevant to a *nix environment rather than Windows.

Cheers, Roland

Answer 1

K & R is one of the best book for C (for obvious reasons). I would strongly suggest to give this book enough time, especially about how C language works, which will give you a deeper understanding of C and the computer systems in general (C being a low level language)

I understand your question in regarding the new resources for C ( dietel and dietel is one), I would strongly suggest you (again :-)) to give K & R its due time, before moving to new resources.

Answer 2

The classic unix era generated quite a few good C programming books. Apart from K&R and the others you mentioned:

• Stevens has written several other books. Check out Unix Network Programming vol. 1 & vol. 2. Amongst other things, these have detailed discussions of Socket, POSIX IPC and pthread library functions.

• There were several other good books from the classic c/unix era. From memory, the main ones are: Rochkind's Advanced Unix Programming, Kernighan and Pike's the Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming and Bentley's Writing Efficient Programs and Programming Pearls). These can also be gotten secondhand fairly cheaply.

Answer 3

Personally, I think the best book for learning C is "A Book on C" by Al Kelley and Ira Pohl. I think it was a better one-stop shop book for learning C than even K&R, which was good, but not quite as well-written.

Answer 4

K&R should teach you everything about the syntax and I would recommend reading lots of code. What I have used is to go on Sourceforge, sort by most popular and find a project I find interesting and start digging in. The Linux kernel is an excellent project although it is pretty huge. You could start by finding an interesting driver to look at.

Also the book Code Complete is an excellent book though it's not a C specific book.

Answer 5

Have a look at Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden (sanitised Amazon link), an excellent book!

Also I totally agree with the suggestion for Andy Koenig's C Traps and Pitfalls that has been made previously.

HTH

cheers,

Rob

Answer 6

Steve Maquire's book: Writing Solid Code is a must read. [Unfortunately it seems to be out of print at Amazon]

Answer 7

Just a clarification C is not about Windows or Unix the greatness of C is that universal language so if you learn C you can write for any platform. You can concentrate on specific library of C and in this case it might be platform specific like threads for example, from over hand once you know how to work correctly with pthreads moving to Windows thread library is trivial ( and vice verse).
So in my opinion if you want to learn C write some code read some code it does not metter if it Windows Linux or embedded.
The best way will be to work on some open source project as it was suggested by many others.

Answer 8

recently i read this book "Programming in C" by Dave Marshall in the internet. this is very interesting for those who like to work on *inx environment.

http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/

for *inx environment, you need to have through understanding of system calls and this book is a very good start to get to know about IPC, threads and RPC.I hope this will bring some interest.

Answer 9

"The Spirit of C" by Mullish & Cooper was one of the best books on C programming in it's day. It can still be found on places like the Amazon "from these resellers" list.

http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-C-Introduction-Modern-Programming/dp/0314285008

When I was teaching C on a regular basis, I used the book

New C Primer Plus - Second Edition by Mitchell Waite & Stephen Prata (Sams Publishing, 1993).

This was a very decent text.

Cheers,

-R

Answer 10

Another book I found browsing around Amazon is The C Companion by Alan Holub - seems to focus more on how C compiles down to assembly - might be of interest.

C Traps & Pitfalls turned out to be pretty much what I was looking for, and I expect the reference will also be useful.

Answer 11

C in a Nutshell is pretty decent. Steve Summit also has some excellent notes and C FAQ that are worth a read.

Answer 12

Curiosity begs me to ask whether you did the accompanying exercises in the k&r. You probably want to read a book like APUE, and try to develop your skills by engaging in a F/OSS project