Neat point, thanks for pointing it out. I love C (even more so after recently learning and using C++), but one minor thing is that frustrating is how hard it is

Neat point, thanks for pointing it out. I love C (even more so after recently learning and using C++), but one minor thing is that frustrating is how hard it is to both (1) get really good at C and (2) the lack of great books on high-level C. In other languages I use, I can get better by studying the source of programmers better than me. With C this is risky, as many large projects have messy code bases, and through their complexity hide the fact that one of C's great features is that it can be extremely lightweight in some projects. The tricks skilled C programmers use are a mix on unadvised hacks (like xor swap) and truly clever, portable, advised concepts. There's also no great C book on higher-level C. Deep C Secrets is good, but perhaps a bit old. If you're using C for data work, you're out of luck (with maybe the exception of Ben Klemen's book, Modelling with Data, which is good but almost uses C too much when a bit of R and python would help). I'd love a book of machine learning and/or computational algorithms in C — with direct data examples.