Name: The New C Standard
ISBN: 9780201709179

The New C Standard

This book contains a detailed analysis of the International Standard for the C language, excluding the library from a number of perspectives (general commentary, implementation details, comparison with 90/C++, coding guidelines, examples and usage). The organization of the material is unusual in that it is based on the actual text of the published C Standard. The unit of discussion is the individual sentences from the C Standard (2022 of them).

What Hacker News says

krylonNov 2022

When I first learned C - which also was my first contact with programming at all - I did not understand how pointers work, and the book I was using was not helpful at all in this department. I only "got" pointers like three or four years later, fortunately programming was still a hobby at that point.

Funnily when I felt confident enough to tell other people about this, several immediate started laughing and told me what a relief it was to hear they weren't the only ones with that experience.

Ah, fun times.

EDIT: One book I found invaluable when getting serious about C was "The New C Standard: A Cultural and Economic Commentary" by Derek Jones (http://knosof.co.uk/cbook). You can read it for free because the book ended up being to long for the publisher's printing presses or something like that. It's basically a sentence-by-sentence annotated version of the C standard (C99 only, though) that tries to explain what the respective sentence means to C programmers and compiler writers and how other languages (mostly C++) deal with the issue at hand, but also how this impacts the work of someone developing coding guidelines for large teams of programmers (which was how the author made a living at the time, possibly still is). It's more than 1500 pages and a very dense read, but it is incredibly fine-grained and in-depth. Definitely not suitable for people who are just learning C, but if you have read "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" and found it too shallow and whimsical, this book was written for you.

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xorblurbMay 2018

Those kind of discussions have various effects, some of which I believe to be far from moot.

First, they permit that some people even take notice about this situation. Few developers read the standard and even less write it or follow the discussions to change it (are they even open?) or write a compiler for it. The rationales are not even tracked [1]. It actually would be insanely hard to get a good understanding of those subjects by e.g. just reading the standard, without having those kind of discussions on forums typically used by more devs than just a few dozens of compiler writers...

[1]: but while I'm thinking about it, an impressive independent book as been written by Derek Jones: The New C Standard: An Economic and Cultural Commentary http://www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html

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