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Comment by tomcat27 | Hacker News Reader

I read the K&R's C Programming book when I was in undergrad.

It's different from other programming books I read from APress, O'Reilly publications.

Hard to digest but never before read a book so short and crisp that fully explains the programming language.

To any noob programmer out there, I'd say pick K&R's book, spend a semester on it, do the exercises. You will become better engineer. You'll not regret.

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I came at this the other way. KnR was my first real book about programming. Next were Bentley. Most O'Reilly and like books are overly wordy and don't get to the meat of the issue for me.

I don't think KnR will make you a much better engineer. But it will give you a really strong boost into being a reasonable c programmer. And it does that well because it focuses on that.

I have not written C in years but remember by heart their coding style in the book. The strcpy(s, t) they present is around 2 lines code looking something like this expression: `s++=t++`. (please don't code review here.. haha).

At that time I was writing verbose loops in class assignments to write similar functions. Looking their code made a strong positive impact. Their codes are poetic.

And the way they unfold topics in the book is so good. Structures and pointers often confusing many people I knew were natural in their book.

For more of a "today's look" as opposed to the way C was written back then, http://www.gopl.io/ is almost as good, still the same style, meant to be digested not skimmed lightly.

Thanks! I haven't had a chance to write Go, never learned it too. Maybe some day. Will remember the author's book.

Add the Orelly UNIX CD Books and you'll have a vast compendium for AWK, sed, perl and scripting.

Also, they are free.

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