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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

not sure i know (or remember) any book that covers the entire field. but i never miss a chance to tell people about "the c programming language" by k&r.

one of a kind and, for some of us, the best book on programming ever written. i would love to see it updated to modern c.

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What do you like about K&R so much? I was excited to dive into it during the C systems programming class I took in school, and it was fine, but I didn’t understand the hype. And I loved learning C / usually care about things like this.

For at least some people, K&R just "clicks". It's written in a way that is crystal clear (to at least some people).

In my case, I read K&R over a Thanksgiving weekend, and I understood all of it[1], even without a compiler to try things out on.

[1] Except for passing command-line arguments into a program (argc and argv). Couldn't understand that one without experimental results.

You read it in three days? Did you skip all the exercises or did it not have any?

I don't recall whether it had exercises. If it did, obviously I skipped them, because I didn't have a compiler.

K&R C definitely has exercises (solutions available at <https://clc-wiki.net/wiki/K%26R2_solutions>) - final one of chapter 1 is write bracket matcher

“The go programming language” ive heard some consider as the modern equivalent and not just because the language is Go.

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