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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

I would be far more impressed and gratified if Prentice Hall were cool enough to offer Kernighan & Ritchie's classic "C Programming Language" (2nd Edition) at 1/2 off their $57.99 sticker-shock price.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernigh...

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I don't even want to think about the cost of this book right now. I recently cleaned out a huge pile of old computer books, stacking them into "keep" and "trash". My copy of K&R is currently missing. Odds are pretty decent that it's floating in a slurry of paper pulp.

With any luck I loaned it out and forgot about it. I'll still never see it again, but at least it's still doing something useful.

I'm on my second one too now. I loaned it a while back to someone and never got it back. In a way I feel good about that. Someone is now a better programmer because of that :) And they obviously liked it enough to keep it.

You can pick up the first edition for a dollar or two. The second doesn't have any groundbreaking information that I'm aware of.

Better yet, you can just grab a pirated PDF copy.

I saw a copy of this at my local Borders for about $25 during their final sale. Sadly I made the mistake of not purchasing it because I was already in the process of learning a few other languages. I figured the price on Amazon would probably be about the same. I was mistaken.

Has this book always been so expensive? I don't remember paying that much for my copy. That was ten years ago though so maybe I'm just getting old :)

You can probably find it for significantly cheaper (i.e. <$10) on cheap, fluorescent-looking paper imported from overseas.

Yup, that's where I got mine a year or so ago. Then, a week later, I found the 1st edition at a thrift shop for a buck.

The quality of the domestic version is so much better, but not $50 better. The price of a legit copy is shameful.

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