4 ms·

Not only is K&R _the_ book for C, it's an example for engaging, lucid, just-right technical writing that any technical manual should strive for.

• alperakgun 15y ago
  The conciseness of this book is what I enjoyed the most, just think it could have been 1000 pages, even more...
• kalid 15y ago
  That book is a reminder of a time when Wrox & friends weren't trying to crank out 5 lb tomes on .NET SOAP Interoperability. So many modern books read like a student trying to pad out a page count for a professor.
  • davidw 15y ago
    I wonder what will happen to books like this, as these guys pass away. For instance, I don't see updated versions of Stevens' books, which are classics in their own right with regards to network and systems programming on Unix. I learned a ton of things from those, and wow, they're sure beautiful books.
    • bch 15y ago
      Hey @davidw. We can hope that they might receive similar treatment as John Ousterhout's "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" did. JOs work (including TatTT) is often held up as excellent writing as well. The second ed. of that book was updated by a group of experts w/ JOs blessing, but w/o his participation if I understand correctly. Indeed @davidw was a contributor to that project ;) (thx. david.)
  • brudgers 15y ago
    I agree, K&R is a landmark. Then again, so is AoCP. Wrox is skinning a different cat by trying to provide the FM which no longer comes in the box. Ritchie knew how to provide just enough back in the days when just enough covered the vast majority of cases.
• bgurupra 15y ago
  In a way I owe my job @ IBM which I got right out of college to that book.Of the many many C books at that time , K&R was obviously the one that was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of explaining C and how to write C programs in a very lucid/concise/Beautiful way and the guys interviewing me were particularly impressed that I almost had memorized K&R and gave me the job which I have to this day