Ask HN: I want to have a basic familiarity with C, shoudl I read K&R?

3 pointswalrus_pen4 comments

I don't plan (at this time) to use C professionally, but I do feel like understanding C well would benefit me professionally (I mostly do Typescript/JS)

I've been trying to settle on a good text to get a "good enough" understanding of C but many of them are much longer than I am motivated to invest in at this time, while K&R is very succinct/short.

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I like K&R but it's so incredibly dated that it would be like reading the HTML 2.0 spec (from '95) to understand web frontend development today. Wouldn't recommend it.

Thanks for the feedback! Any more brief texts that you recommend?

The common suggestion seems to be Gustedt's "Modern C" (https://modernc.gforge.inria.fr/) which is available in print but has a free ebook version. Just stop at the end of chapter 14 and it's probably around the same length as K&R. It's a bit heavy-handed on the prescriptiveness for my taste but decent material.

Great, thank you!

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