C programming

What Hacker News says

1. purple-leafyJan 2025
   C Programming: A Modern Approach (K N King) that I recently finished, has been great.

   Prior to that, JavaScript the Definitive Guide.

   Also cracked into Crafting Interpreters (was great) but got sidetracked.

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2. shricApr 2023
   I would highly recommend C Programming: A Modern Approach by K.N. King as an alternative and replacement for K&R.

   http://knking.com/books/c2/index.html

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3. robayeJan 2023
   C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King. I’ve never seen another book that contains as many exercises and projects as Kings book does.
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4. jshrakeDec 2022
   I recommend C Programming: A Modern Approach by K.N. King http://knking.com/books/c2/index.html. My favorite part of this book is the exercises at the end of each chapter.
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5. pkkmDec 2022
   The K&R book is a great example of clear technical writing, but it's also quite terse. I'd recommend C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King instead, as it uses a more gentle pedagogical approach.
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6. Arch-TKDec 2022
   I think a good place to start is to mostly ignore most/all the advice in this thread. I haven't obviously read every response but I have struggled to find any response near the top which isn't recommending something which will give poor results or is outright wrong.

   Good resources:

   - #c on libera.chat *

   - https://www.iso-9899.info/

   Good books:

   - C Programming: A Modern Approach - K. N. King

   - K&R2 with the errata at hand and the guidance of someone experienced when doing all the exercises

   Good advice:

   - Don't write a single line for which you are not sure that the behaviour is either well defined by the standard or by your particular implementation (and if the latter is the case, ensure you are well aware of the implications and document them appropriately).

   - C is not a "try it and see" language, trying it will lead to undefined behavior and buggy code which you might not even become aware of until you have "learned" the language.

   - Lots of C out there is littered with poor practices or heavily specialised to the task/target set of architectures/situation and is therefore not a good example for learning. Feel free to read lots of C once you have the fundamentals down, not before.

   Things to avoid:

   - Every online tutorial (no I haven't seen them all but none of the popular ones seem to instill the right discipline and are usually full of errors, one of the ones linked from this thread has a bug in the hello world program in the first exercise).

   - Most books on the matter.

   - Writing C.

   * disclaimer: I am one of the founders of this channel.

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