Re: help me learn C



Chris Hills said:

In article <L5ydndXJ9pxOEsnZnZ2dnUVZ8qCdnZ2d@xxxxxx>, Richard Heathfield
<invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
abhi said:

hi everybody am new to this group and help me to learn C

*THE* C book is:

The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed. Kernighan & Ritchie. Prentice Hall,
1988. ISBN 0-13-110362-8 (paperback), or 0-13-110370-9 (hardback).


It is over 18 years old now. The language has moved on a long way since
then. The current C standard is about twice the size of the 1990 version

The current C standard, though, doesn't add a great number of significant
changes to the language that K&R2 describes. A great many of the additions
in C99 were to do with relatively esoteric mathematical operations that few
people care about. There are a few minor additions (BCPL comment syntax,
VLAs, compound literals, and the like), but these are of little moment. In
any case, some of these features are not supported (or not supported in a
conforming manner) by mainstream compilers.

Furthermore, even if you disagree that those features are relatively minor,
K&R2 remains a well-written introduction to the "core" of the language.

Also K&R is a language definition Much like a dictionary. Yiu do not use
a dictionary to learn to write novels or business reports.

Firstly, you appear to be ignoring the first seven chapters of the book (for
we will lay aside the eighth as being off-topic). Secondly, to take your
"novel" analogy, K&R2's purpose is not to teach programming, but to teach C
itself. It achieves this limited goal extremely well.

Try the book review section at http://www.accu.org

Well, I tried. I found an advertisement for movie reviews; another for "the
place to watch cinema and film reviews on your PC and shop online"; one for
MARK LOGIC, whatever that is; another for Amazon; and one for Blackwells.

When I used their search facility to look for "C", the first hits were: The
Complete C++ Training Course, Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales;
Exceptional C++; Borland C++ Builder 3 for Dummies; and Multi-Paradigm
Design for C++.

In fact, there were no C books in the first ten hits in the list. I didn't
look further. The average length of the reviews for the first ten books was
2.2 lines, or 19.9 words if you prefer.

It is possible that longer, more relevant reviews of C books are available
if you are prepared to register for the site, of course, but even if that
is true, it is not readily apparent from the material presented to those
who are /not/ registered, so there is little incentive to register. There
is also no indication of how much (if anything) it costs to register.

ACCU's usefulness appears to have taken a dive.

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at above domain (but drop the www, obviously)
.



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