[ale] C programming books

[Les Neste]

At 05:00 PM 6/1/99 -0400, Daniel S Cox wrote:
>Tri,
>
>At 04:42 PM 6/1/1999 -0400, Tri wrote:
>>I'm going to buy a C programming book  from Amazon.com very very soon.
>>Is there a "Must Get" book you can suggest for a beginner. I don't want
>>a very easy, hand holding book, just one that lays the basic groundwork
>>quickly and thoroughly and goes into detail about the advanced stuff. 

In terms of understanding the langauge itself, it sometimes helps to get in
the mindset of the guys who wrote it.  The guys who wrote C had a clear
understanding of both assembler and how a compiler generates assembler from
source code, and they wrote it to make life easier for themselves on a
cast-off computer to which UNIX had recently been ported.  The introduction
section to 'The C Programming Language' provides a good foundation in the
philosophy behind the langauge.

I like C just fine and do a lot of my programming with it, but If you find
yourself wondering why a feature was implemented a certain way -- like
calling a function to concatenate two strings instead of using the '+'
operator -- just say to yourself "it's better than assembler" because
that's what the language was designed to replace.  


......................................................................

Les Neste
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