[PRL] C book recommendation?

[Felix S Klock II]

David (cc'ing PRL this time)-

On Jan 14, 2009, at 10:44 AM, Felix S Klock II wrote:

> On Jan 14, 2009, at 10:31 AM, David Van Horn wrote:
>
>> An ambitious 213 student asked me for a book recommendation on C  
>> (he's
>> doing some kernel hacking).  I told him K&R.  Are there others you  
>> would
>> recommend?
>
> I approve of K&R.
>
> I also think the O'Reilly book, "Practical C Programming", by Steve  
> Oualline, was a useful book (I picked it up when I had to get back  
> into C programming).

Oh, how could I forget:

"Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" (by W. Richard Stevens)  
is fantastic, for someone who is ambitious and wants to understand how  
things work.  (As in, "what is this file descriptor stuff?  And what  
are those socket thingies?")  I think its a great book for application  
developers, as it explains several standard *libraries* that have to  
know if you want to do serious work in C; I do not know if it is as  
useful for kernel hackers.

(I *wish* I had followed the advice of friends and read this book as  
an undergraduate, or at least gone through enough of it to know it  
would be a great reference.)

----

If the student is looking to do kernel hacking, he may want to look at  
one of the books that actually discusses that topic in particular.

The only one of those that I've looked at is "Lions' Commentary on  
UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code", which I think is interesting from  
a historical perspective (and also because it fits the full kernel  
source code into a reasonably sized book) but it may not be the best  
for someone who wants to do kernel hacking on Linux or BSD, since  
there are books out there dedicated to those kernels.

Its a bit of a shame that the kernel-traffic website is no longer  
maintained; I remember that being a fascinating site to browse when I  
was an undergraduate.

-Felix