Book Recomendation for C programmers.

Back in earlier blog postings, I wrote about getting back to writing in C. I started this work last year a bit lost. I hadn’t written any C code since my college days (some fifteen or so years ago). I set out on a quest to find that one book that would help clear some of my programming cobwebs.

I went back to my old standby in college: C Programming Language (2nd Edition). Kernighan and Ritchie were the defacto authors of the time, they were the ones who wrote the language!. This is the best reference manual for core C concepts and programming. At the time I also has professors who could spell out the book in simple english terms and concepts. The book today is almost foreign to me. (sigh).

I needed a book that could give me that classroom feel to learning C once again. After doing a lot of research I finally came across a true gem: C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition. It took about a month to work my way through the book in reading and doing some of the exercises at the end of each chapter. By the time I was finished I was fluent enough in C to start creating some respectable code.

I highly recommend this book to the sophomore or rusty experienced programmer. For the true novice programmer you can use this book but there’s a steep learning curve to programming in general that you should tackle with a more high level language first..