The C Programming Language ANSI C Version

-pure-

Paperback: 274 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 2nd edition (March 22, 1988)
ISBN: 0131103628

Classic book. For example, the very first exercise given is to print
"hello, world" became a standard way of introducing new language in a
programming books. Not for the beginner, you need to know well at
least one other language before reading this book. Might serve as a
quick reference too. Written when memory was expensive, hence it takes
all the short cuts to save storage. Therefore some examples
(hort implementation of famous UNIX commands) are no longer represent
recommended way of coding them.

It shows its age. In 2003 one can see weaknesses and their
tool-oriented approach looks somewhat naive in view of existence of
scripting languages like Perl, Python, TCL, etc. Still it is a
valuable book that somewhat illuminated (sometimes questionable)
tradeoffs in designing C as a hybrid of BCPL and PL/1. From the point
of view of PL/1 heritage especially problematic was C treatment of
strings (downgrading them into a library) and you can find some
interesting info about this design decision in the book.