gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (11/18/89)
"C: A Reference Manual" By Harbison & Guy Steele I think this is a better reference than Kernighan & Ritchie. The authors have implemented far more C compilers than Kernighan & Ritchie. I was amazed to learn new things from this book, after ten years of C programming (using Kernighan & Ritchie's first edition). One flaw with Kernighan & Ritchie, 1st edition: It's hard to find the answer to a question, using the index. Information is scattered all over the book. This makes it a rather poor (although definitive) reference, in my opinion. Kernighan & Ritchie, 1st edition, is slightly deceptive. As examples, they use nearly *every* artful piece of compact code from UNIX. This is misleading -- it makes C seem like a miraculously simple language. Real C programs are a great deal more complicated than these contrived examples.