“Learn C the Hard Way” is no longer available for free

I have to be honest: the fact this is in "things not to read" from ISO is one of the strongest endorsements I could imagine. For that to happen, it must both be successful enough to get on their radar, and also to tick them off.

That said, I know why this is on the list. Zed honestly doesn't like C, by which I mean that he recommends a lot of things that are (in my opinion) genuinely best-practice, but fly in the face of either historical norms, or the techniques that the ISO C team wants to push. Depending on what you're aiming for, this might indeed make it a bad work—but it can also make it a great one. I'd liken it in some sense to DJB's projects: Zed recommends a fairly unorthodox, but (again, in my opinion) excellent way of writing C. If you need to interface with people who write C the way most people write C—you're working on an operating system, perhaps, or a legacy codebase—this may be a problem. If you're writing C because you need to write a few components of your project in C for performance or [lack of] abstraction reasons, and would prefer not to hate yourself later, it's great.

##c is the single most pedantic internet forum I've ever been in. Also the only time I've seen someone spell "coördinate" with the Diaeresis in chat was in that channel.

Yeah, but this is ##c: when they say "factual problems," they mean that at some point Zed said that a function took an array as an argument, or that the book didn't match up to the letter of the C standard. And "doing things wrong" means not checking the return value of every single syscall you use.

It's on the full list[0].

  Beej's Guide to C: http://beej.us/guide/bgc/output/html/singlepage/bgc.html
  Full of mistakes.

[0]: http://www.iso-9899.info/wiki/Main_Page#Stuff_that_should_be...

...which was my point. Freenode #c knows their stuff, more or less, but you follow the same rules you do around Erik Naggum or /g/: keep your head down, be cautious, and show no weakness.

The funniest part is that the C in K&R is not really much different, let alone better, than in any of the books they recommend against. I guarantee K&R would be on their list of books to avoid if it wasn't written by… well, K&R.

I've used & contributed to Daniel's stuff (mostly mpc¹) and his code is (IMO) quite high quality. ##c is a bit deluded.

¹ https://github.com/orangeduck/mpc

>But really, few programming books are as good as K&R.

Agreed.

I asked about the price because it is, or at least used to be, a lot less expensive than that, in India, from the time when I first bought a copy (when first learning C, near the start of my career), to at least some years ago, when I bought several copies of it to give to the students of a C course I was conducting for a company. In that whole period it was just a few hundred rupees (INR) in price, which is just a few USD (under $10 or so, even with the change in exchange rate over the years). I do know that publishers have variable pricing for different countries, of course.

Decades back when I was a competent C programmer, I liked Harbison and Steele's C: A Reference Manual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.#Books

If you want to buy a cheap printed version search on abebooks.com. They usually have international editions at competitive prices. I used to buy all my college textbooks from there.

You were not the first person to suggest Klemens's book to me, but after reading it, I disagree with most of it.

Interesting list. Not worked much on C recently (though I am some on D these days), but had used it a lot earlier. I first started with K&R (not because I knew it was good or the best then - IMO, maybe some will not agree, and it may not be the best for a beginner), but because it was the only one available at that time and place, IIRC. Later I did read some other C books. I think the Kochan (Steven?) one you mention was one of them, and maybe also the Prata book. IIRC, the Kochan one was good. One book I read had an example of creating an index or concordance of a text file or program, maybe it was Kochan. Remember enjoying the logic.

I'm going to date myself here, but my first book was "Learning to Program in C" by Plum. It was an incredible beginners guide to C, but predates C89, so is a bit too dated at this point to recommend to people.

The same author also wrote "Reliable Data Structures in C" and I would love to update it for at least the features in C99 (C structs became a lot more useful at that point), as that book is a great read in that it walks you through the reasoning for doing things in a certain way, as well as providing the final result in code.

Problem is that if you are new to C, you might not know which ones are the better book. If you don't need C and need to tool up in a week, it's best to spend that $30 and learn what you can than lose some days trying to figure out what the best book is. Plenty of times, good enough is good enough.

If I offered you a BMW M5 for $2000, would your first thought be, "hmm, I should check to see if someone is selling the same car for $1800"?

Programming book preferences are fine, useful even! Complaints about book prices are silly. Take your career more seriously.

I guess my point is just: pretty much all technical books are fantastically, comically underpriced.

Most of the cost of the book isn't even its price, it's the time wasted going though it if it turns out to be bad. Or worse the time spent unlearning it if it's out of date, incorrect, doesn't follow conventions, or doesn't follow best practices.

I'm incredibly wary of just about any textbook that isn't an official reference for this reason.

Meyers is undoubtedly the master. Koenig certainly gives his own slant on things though and is enjoyable to read.