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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

There is, essentially, nothing to be known about C beyond what is in this book. If you can read those 272 pages, and understand them all, then you are well on the way to being a C wizard.

Say what? This is like saying that once you know what all the commands in Illustrator do, you're well on your way to being a professional illustrator. The reason that K&R is so small is that so much of C programming happens outside/above the language.

I like K&R a lot, and I won't argue that it's the best soup-to-nuts C book (though I recommend C Interfaces and Implementations more heartily). But if everything you need to know about C is in K&R, how do you implement a balanced tree?

(I caught myself typing "how do you implement a hash table", and remembered that K&R actually has a hash table in it. Damn you, K&R!)

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But if everything you need to know about C is in K&R, how do you implement a balanced tree?

Read a good algorithms text to learn about balanced trees. Once you understand what one is, you ought to have learned enough about C from K&R to be able to implement one in C.

Java programmers don't need to read algorithms books to get sorted-access lookup tables. That's all I'm saying.

And software managers don't need to know anything to tell you to write a program - I wouldn't brag about knowing Java here in 'C' land ;-)

Being a C wizard doesn't mean you know how to implement a balanced tree. It means that if you understand a concept, like a red-black tree for example, then you can efficiently implement it in C.

tptacek, I LOLled at your last comment :-)

But I think you're being unfairly selective in your quoting of the original article. _Immediately_ after the part you excerpted, it continues: "(Er, assuming you have the patience to go on to accumulate a decade of experience leading to wisdom, taste, good judgement and technical intuition.)"

@tptacek and others on this thread, what books do you suggest to learn modern C programing? I am an experienced programmer, but all of my experience has been with JVM languages. I would like to be able to read and debug C/C++ programs - so which books provide a good start on idioms, libraries and tools?

_C Interfaces and Implementations_ by David Hanson.

I'm using it as the textbook for a weekend C class I'm about to run for a bunch of Ruby/Java programmers, because CII basically gives you back all the data structures you have in Ruby that C "takes away" from you.

It'll also teach you a style of C development (ADT-centric, modular, heavy on function pointers) that holds up pretty well and is relatively modern.

Reading that at the moment to improve my C style. It's excellent.

This looks like tptacek's review on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/review/RMXKDJNH8UOPU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...

It's not exactly a book suggestion, but hacking on the Linux kernel can give you experience with a sizable code base in reasonably good C. If you are or want to be a Unix developer at all, become good friends with the man command and make sure you have the complete set of manual pages installed (and, ideally, the POSIX original man pages as well to compare your system to the spec).

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