Effective C
A detailed introduction to the C programming language for experienced programmers. The world runs on code written in the C programming language, yet most schools begin the curriculum with Python or Java. Effective C bridges this gap and brings C into the modern era--covering the modern C17 Standard as well as potential C2x features. With the aid of this instant classic, you'll soon be writing professional, portable, and secure C programs to power robust systems and solve real-world problems. Robert C. Seacord introduces C and the C Standard Library while addressing best practices, common errors, and open debates in the C community. Developed together with other C Standards committee experts, Effective C will teach you how to debug, test, and analyze C programs. You'll benefit from Seacord's concise explanations of C language constructs and behaviors, and from his 40 years of coding experience.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
8mentions
8people
2020–2025years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Among non-fiction what stood out to me was David Bentley Hart's All Things are Full of Gods, great book also very fun to read written as a Platonic dialogue. To me one of the most compelling theologians today.
Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting.
Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them.
The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books.
Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.
Among technical books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, probably more relevant than it ever was in an age of artifical man-hours added to projects. Robert Seacord Effective C, after not having written C in a long time. Really good intermediate level book for modern C. Also making my way through The Little Schemer as a replacement for advent of code in the second half of the month this year.
- Apart from the compulsory K&R's, I would also suggest Robert Seacord's Effective C.
- I have been programming in C professionally for the past ~4 years on a multi-threaded application in the ads industry and that is central to the business. C has lot of documented "foot-guns" but most of it (if not all of it) can be safeguarded against mis-use using "support structures" around the codebase like having standard code style (enforced via tools as much as possible), static code analysis (via compiler and external code scanning tools), dynamic code analysis (via Asan, Ubsan etc), having small, medium and large tests with right amount of code coverage etc. In addition to that, having a standard set of libraries (c modules for high performance data-structures/algorithms, macro based templates to work with types) and threading model goes a long way in reducing the pain to a very bare minimum. On the plus side, you enjoy a "simpler" language syntax that is easy to learn and with the above “support structures” one can become productive in no time. Plus there are newer books in the market that can teach you C properly, one I have read and recommend is "Effective C by Robert C. Seacord" - the author is one of the C standards committee members so you can't go wrong with the choice.
- Love the intro and overview — looking forward to more!
These weren't mentioned in the post but have been very helpful in my journey as a C beginner so far:
- Effective C by Robert C. Seacord. It covers a lot of the footguns and gotchas without assuming too much systems or comp-sci background knowledge. https://nostarch.com/Effective_C (Also, how can you not buy a book on C with Cthulhu on the cover written by a guy with _three_ “C”s in his name?)
- Tiny C Projects by Dan Gookin, for a “learn by doing” approach. https://www.manning.com/books/tiny-c-projects
- Exercism's C language track: https://exercism.org/tracks/c
- Computer Systems, A Programmer's Perspective by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron for a deeper dive into memory, caches, networking, concurrency and more using C, with plenty of practice problems: https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/
- Since 2020 there was a new good book on C from Robert Seacord from the C Standards committee: https://nostarch.com/Effective_C
- https://nostarch.com/Effective_C by Robert C. Seacord. a little about the book and the motivation behind "Why C": https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9237323
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