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by eropple 4566 days ago
Sorry, but I seriously have to disagree: 21st Century C is one of the worst tech books I've had the misfortune to read. It's written by a butthurt C devotee whose interest is as much in sneering at other languages as it is in teaching something. It argues brace styles and text editors. It's loaded with inaccuracies. It can't be bothered to mention when it's using a header file to introduce a function. Typos abound. It seriously, without the slightest trace of humor, includes a chapter called "Becoming a Better Typist." It's just...crap. I stopped buying O'Reilly books after I couldn't get a refund for this mess.

This article is by clueful professionals. That book is everything except that.
1 comments
mitchty 4566 days ago
Are you reading the same book as me, there is NO (FULL STOP) chapter named becoming a better typist. There is a note with that title at page 100 (ebook not sure on book), its also 4 short paragraphs long.

Is the entire book great? No, to be honest it touched too little on the C side for me, and yeah the punk analogies was a bit annoying at times, but it did get me to look critically at how I wrote c. Much like this blog I'm writing for clarity first and not optimization.

What would you recommend for a c programming book instead of this book?

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eropple 4566 days ago
Sorry, yeah, it was a section, not a chapter. My bad. Its existence is still stupid and is a good anecdote regarding the book's lack of focus.

I haven't yet found a decent C book. I've found many good C++ books and have backported the lessons I've learned there into C, however.

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mitchty 4565 days ago
Agreed as to overall lack of focus, I was annoyed that until chapter 7 there really wasn't much C to speak of, and the last chapters where he finally got into interesting things, were far too short.

That said I did learn a few tricks, and generally appreciated the books overall tone of you don't need to do crazy pointer stuff/malloc/realloc in C in general. If that makes any sense, have you read the Embedded TDD in C book by Pragmatic Programmers? http://pragprog.com/book/jgade/test-driven-development-for-e...

What C++ books would you recommend specifically? I find most to not really be of much help in straight C given the differences of the two languages (basically huge reliance on the standard library etc..).

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