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by jorgecastillo 3560 days ago
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-c-manual.html

This is my favorite C related documentation online. The first book on C I read was a PDF of K&R, I liked it. I used to think the paperback was way too expensive. Instead I bought C Primer Plus, never read it. Few books capture the gist of a language as well as K&R in as little space. Though Modern Perl and Programming in Lua also come to mind. If they ever make an updated version of K&R I would definitely buy it.

1 comments

>I used to think the paperback was way too expensive.

How much was it?

Around $50 USD in Amazon, like today. I just thought it was too much for the quantity of pages. But really, few programming books are as good as K&R. I still think the editorial is particularly greedy when it comes to this book. Still I don't recommend any C book, other than K&R.
If you want to buy a cheap printed version search on abebooks.com. They usually have international editions at competitive prices. I used to buy all my college textbooks from there.
Decades back when I was a competent C programmer, I liked Harbison and Steele's C: A Reference Manual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.#Books
>But really, few programming books are as good as K&R.

Agreed.

I asked about the price because it is, or at least used to be, a lot less expensive than that, in India, from the time when I first bought a copy (when first learning C, near the start of my career), to at least some years ago, when I bought several copies of it to give to the students of a C course I was conducting for a company. In that whole period it was just a few hundred rupees (INR) in price, which is just a few USD (under $10 or so, even with the change in exchange rate over the years). I do know that publishers have variable pricing for different countries, of course.