[PRL] C book recommendation?

[John Clements]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 7:57 AM, Felix S Klock II wrote:

> 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.)

Peter Van Der Linden, "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets"

It's written by a member of Sun's compiler team, and

a) is the most readable C book on earth, with digressions on  
everything you can imagine,
b) contains (e.g.) a newsgroup posting from Dennis Ritchie explaining  
where C's operator precedence came from,
and
c) has absolutely no respect for the sanctity of the language; it's  
like the guy telling you about all the crazy stuff he bolted onto his  
Pinto--he *knows* it's still a Pinto under there.

I can't say enough good things about this book.

John Clements

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