C Language Resources | Hacker News Reader

C Language Resources

mycplus.com

105 pointsRBerenguel18 comments

Today I was trying to find some resources(sites, books, etc) in order to keep up to date with some programming languages. One of them was C and I found the following site:

http://www.di-mgt.com.au/cprog.html

Just to mention that the last update of this page was on 1 January 2010.

It's fascinating watching the HN community ebb and flow around topics, there's this collective conscious that discusses programming languages (mostly) and some days the tide takes us to a heavily Pythonic view of the world, and this week we're having a c revivalist movement.

I thinking writing a system to identify topics on HN day after day and try to correlate this with other events might be interesting, is it for example all reactionary, is it some form of herding, does it follow topics on other similar forums, or just pseudo-random.

Back to the topic. There is one definitive C resource, K&R.

K&R doesn't cover c99, which makes C far less annoying to write in, IMHO.

Unfortunately I don't have a good, comprehensive reference for c99 to offer up myself.

The C99 standard itself and corresponding Wikipedia pages are quite useful. The gcc manual is also a handy reference for determining whether a particular gcc feature is standard compliant.

http://www.google.com/search?&q=filetype%3Apdf+iso+9899

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99

Funny that only 2 commercial compilers are fully supporting C99 standard: IBM Rational logiscope >= 6.4 and Sun Studio.

The excellent, C: A Reference Manual (5th edition) covers C99.

http://www.careferencemanual.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-Samuel-P-Harbison/dp/...

What about "The C Programming Language"? Didn't that make a lot of us better programmers by teaching us how to use C?

It's a classic and certainly taught me a lot.

It's also one of the more slim programming books on my shelf. I've considered handing to to friends interested in programming. Simply because I hand them a Python book with thousands of pages and I can see them visibly cringe.

I also find the K&R style quite readable. :)

I also love K&R's style, it is one of my favourite books about programming

Konig's Traps and Pitfalls, another slim book

http://www.amazon.com/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0201...

Yes. But I'd also recommend getting Stephen Prata's C Primer Plus. It covers C99, and talks about more complicated topics such as multiple pointer indirection and the preprocessor.

I learned from the original edition back in the 80's. When I saw the price at Amazon I was surprised. The list price is given as $67. The Amazon price is $48. The book's a classic but the pricing seems excessive given that the edition is 22 years old.

yeah k&r is great i remember going through it my first time and being amazed at how elegant the example code was. Really a great book

This looks like it's only online resources, but I'm reading C Interfaces and Implementations, and it's great. I wish I had read it earlier. Even though I don't use C much at work, it's quite an interesting step from K&R.

I would recommend adding the Linux Kernel Coding Style guide to the list of recommended reading for C programmers. You don't have to follow its advice, but seeing some of the reasoning behind the policies therein can improve your appreciation of the language details.

Original version (text): http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle

Formatted version (HTML): http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/view/hacker/part2/hacke...

This list is full of valuable links. Thank you all!

Website is down :(

HN + Reddit, apparently too much for the server. Maybe it'll respond properly later.

EDIT: I just refreshed and it worked.

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