Modern C
Summary Modern C focuses on the new and unique features of modern C programming. The book is based on the latest C standards and offers an up-to-date perspective on this tried-and-true language. About the technology C is extraordinarily modern for a 50-year-old programming language. Whether you’re writing embedded code, low-level system routines, or high-performance applications, C is up to the challenge. This unique book, based on the latest C standards, exposes a modern perspective of this tried-and-true language. About the book Modern C introduces you to modern day C programming, emphasizing the unique and new features of this powerful language. For new C coders, it starts with fundamentals like structure, grammar, compilation, and execution. From there, you’ll advance to control structures, data types, operators, and functions, as you gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening under the hood. In the final chapters, you’ll explore performance considerations, reentrancy, atomicity, threads, and type-generic programming. You’ll code as you go with concept-reinforcing exercises and skill-honing challenges along the way. What's inside Operators and functions Pointers, threading, and atomicity C’s memory model Hands-on exercises About the reader For programmers comfortable writing simple programs in a language like Java, Python, Ruby, C#, C++, or C.
Stats for nerds
37recommend
55mentions
45people
2015–2025years
84% recommend16% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- What is “C development”?
K&R is a great intro.
If you want a book that digs deeper, try Modern C by Jens Gustedt. It’s update for C23 this year, and it’s CC (free).
If you want to make something like TigerBeetle or Redis, that’s sort of just specialised back-end development.
You can also do embedded in C. And you can make operating systems.
What people often do when they want a career change is: they work on New Thing in their spare time; they find this little niche at work where New Thing could fit; they find that there’s a limit to how much workplace will let them prioritise New Thing; they start applying for jobs where New Thing is a focus point, with a non-empty resume.
- > "Vibe coding" will be a more colorful and better remembered mile marker of this lousy decade in computers than Rust, which will be an obscurity in an appendix in 100 years.
I doubt it.
I'm teaching a course on C this fall. As textbook I've chosen "Modern C" by Jens Gustedt (updated for C23).
I'm asked by students "Why don't you choose K&R like everyone else?"
And while the book is from 1978 (ANSI C edition in 1988), and something I've read joyously more than once, I'm reminded of how decades of C programmers have been doing things "the old way" because that's how they're taught. As a result, the world is made of old C programs.
With this momentum of religiously rewriting things in Rust we see in the last few years (how many other languages have rewritten OpenSSL and the GNU coreutils?), the amount of things we depend on that was incidentally rewritten in Rust grows significantly.
Hopefully people won't be writing Rust in 100 years. Since 100 years ago mathematicians were programming mechanical calculators and analog computers, and today kids are making games. But I bet you a whole lot of infrastructure still runs Rust.
In fact, anything that is convenient to Vibe code in the coming years will drown out other languages by volume. Rust ain't so bad for vibe coding.
- Jens Gustedt's Modern C https://gustedt.gitlabpages.inria.fr/modern-c/
- I second "Modern C" by Jen Gustedt.
- Get the `cdecl` tool to build intuition about function signatures. What does "int( * ( *foo)(void))[3]" mean?
- Write it yourself.
- Be disciplined. Develop good hygiene with compiler flags, memory/address checks, and even fuzzing.
- Read good source code such as the linux kernel. This is an amusing header file from the git source code that defines some banned functions. This is wisdom if you choose to follow it: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/banned.h
- Push the language to its limits. Play with memory and data structures. Inspect everything. This book "Data-Oriented Design" by Richard Fabien is a great to explore as well. It's about organizing your data for efficient processing.
- I love Modern C by Jens Gustedt. I will stick to the older version without C23, as I prefer C99, but pretty sure this version is great, too. I learnt a lot from reading this book.
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