The C Programming Language #

Rating: 4.2/5

This is a technical book for training and learning how to program in C. In this regard it succeeds and is both an excellent book and short enough to keep a diligent student for the time it needs. What takes it down two notches is there's nothing there for describing how you should architect programs(which is fair as that's not the point, but in a modern textbook I'd expect at least a section on this), and because it does not talk about the C standard library much. Particular things missing are coverage on appropriate types such as uint16_t and so on that describe the bit length and whether it is signed. The standard int, float and double all have variations that depend on how the compiler chooses to build the program for the system and because of this can produce unpredictable results in different systems.

I will say I feel that many programming language books have used this book as the prototype around which they are designed. To me a big important thing in it is the appendices and the presence of reasonable exercises. Without the exercises, it'd be effectively just documentation which has its time and place.

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Published on 2026/02/20