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by pjmlp 286 days ago
That is a myth often spread by folks that think K&R C book is everything there is to know, never opened the ISO C draft PDF, learned the differences between POSIX and standard library, tried to make their code portable outside GCC or nowadays clang, or even checked the extensions chapter on the compiler.
1 comments
anta40 285 days ago
Who told that? I still hear K&R being recommended as introduction material.

If you want to write portable/production-grade C code, well definitely need to study another references.

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Arch-TK 285 days ago
There are very few resources for learning C which aren't themselves full of terrible C.

If you want a short introduction with the caveat that it only covers C89, only covers parts of it, and doesn't cover e.g. POSIX or anything outside of standard C then K&R2 + errata is fine.

If you want a long book on C which has a more modern approach then there is K. N. King's C a Modern Approach.

Jens' book is at least vouched for by https://iso-9899.info/wiki/Books . So I have to assume it's also okay.

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adamors 285 days ago
Exactly, I was looking into refreshing my C knowledge recently and K&R is still heavily recommended.
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flohofwoe 285 days ago
The problem with K&R is that there never was a third edition that covered C99, which compared to C89 is almost a new language.

K&R is an interesting historical artifact about the basic design decisions of the C language and definitely recommended reading material, but you're not doing yourself a favour using it as reference or for learning the language. For that it is vastly outdated, C ist a much more enjoyable and powerful language since C99.

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pjmlp 285 days ago
Go with such a book instead,

https://www.manning.com/books/modern-c

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adamors 285 days ago
How does this compare to https://nostarch.com/effective-c-2nd-edition ?
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pjmlp 285 days ago
I guess it is also a good one, both authors are still active on WG14, if I am not mistaken.
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pjmlp 285 days ago
Because most people know no better, and recommend their UNIX heros.

This is a more useful book for modern days,

https://www.manning.com/books/modern-c

flohofwoe already put it out clearly on his comment.

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