>I'm sure it's a cliche at this point, but I don't think enough writers emulate K&R's style on The C Programming Language. The prose is short, dense, and yet no

>I'm sure it's a cliche at this point, but I don't think enough writers emulate K&R's style on The C Programming Language. The prose is short, dense, and yet not tedious. Agreed. It's also very clear, although at least I had to read many paragraphs more than once to really grok the meaning. Anecdote: Some years after learning C from that book, and using it a lot at work, I once conducted a C programming course for 10 to 15 senior devs of the IT dept. of a public sector company (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited), all of whom had over 10 years software experience (but not on C and Unix, their experience was on some mainframe, I think Unisys, and some proprietary software running on it). I used the K&R C book for the course. I put a lot of effort into it, and they were pleased with the training. They arranged a small send-off for me on the last evening, with tea and snacks, the manager of the team made a brief speech, thanking me (they were that formal kind) and they gave me a gift as a token of appreciation - a quartz wall clock, which I still have. Another fun thing I remember from that course was that I asked them this question at the end of the course: "How do you write a C program?" As expected, they were all puzzled. I mean, they had just attended the course, right? They knew now (some) how to write C programs. No one could think of an appropriate answer. Then I gave them my answer: "Very carefully."