My Googling results in a huge amount of unnecessary results with C. My hope is to get the best C manuals local. I find the reference useful here. I would like to make my own notes and removal to the manual.
Can I manage it somehow like a local manual?
Feedback to the repliers worried about the law
Please, read this post about some law philosophies:
I am not sure the author would like you copying their work. So my answer does not apply to your question about managing the manual locally. One thing you can do is to use web annotation tools to manage your own notes. Take note of that little pesky notice at the top "© Copyright 1997 Eric Huss" and please respect it.
You could save the web page ("Save Webpage Complete") to your local drive.
There are also a lot of PDF versions of C manuals. Search google for "c manual pdf" - the first result is one by Dennis Richie.
(Beware copyright violations though, I'm not really clear on when you can make personal copies under "fair use")
If you're on Unix, a lot of the C library is available as man pages. E.g. "man memcpy", "man malloc", etc.
Look at http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/ and you will see a c guide tar file. I suspect you could download that file, expand it on your local system, and then annotate at will.
Well, first, you could buy Harbison and Steele.
The one you link is marked copyright 1997, so I'd suggest you write the author at [email protected] and ask permission. But there's nothing preventing you from using wget to download a copy.
You could use something like wget to grab the site and store it locally.
You could then edit the pages yourself, adding/removing content you see fit.
This worked for me:
wget --mirror -w 2 -p --convert-links http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
Yes, to do this download the entire manual using your browser, wget or whichever tool you have available. Next create a bookmark to the files on your hard drive or optionally install a local webserver to link to. Finally, you can add notes by editing the files, or by using annotations as ojblass suggests.
Also, here's another I find handy, an archive of some comp.lang.c posts.
Most C functions are already described on your system in the manpages. For instance, man floor will give you the documentation for the floor function. Sometimes there is a conflict between a function and commandline program. A good example of this is man printf which gives you the manpage for the printf command (printf(1)). At the end of the page you will normally find a SEE ALSO section that lists other places to look. In this case you should see printf(3). You can display that page by saying man 3 printf.
Most answers bring up the legality of the thing or lack thereof.
Actually, I am not so sure making a local copy of a website strictly for personal use constitutes copyright infringement.
First of all, there is no mention of where the person is located, so we don't even know what copyright laws apply. For instance, Canada and Australia have some explicit positions regarding personal use of lawfully acquired properties, and I believe there are a few rulings in the US along the same line.
Second, by visiting a website, you are automatically making a personal copy using a software called a browser. This is not, I believe, a copyright violation.
Should the user use an offline browser of some kind (like wget) to visit the website and store it on his hard drive, I do not see why this would be prohibited in anyway.
Antecedents and context are also important. If you consider that most websites are archived and made publicly available by the wayback machine (see http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide), an usage which is not challenged (archive.org is based in the US), it is pretty difficult to make a valid argument against a private copy intented as a personal reference.
In short, I don't think making a personal copy of a website for strictly private use is a violation of current copyright laws in most countries.
On the other end, distributing the said copy would be a different matter entirely.