c

Practical C Programming, 3rd Edition
$34.95
Well, first off I'd like to mention I am not a programmer, and actually come from more of an engineering discipline. I'm not totally new to programming concepts having done work with assembly language along with some basic unix shell scripting tasks in the past.

I picked up this book primarily because I was looking to learn more about the internals of unix systems but needed a primer on the C language first.

For me, the book wasn't very engaging. It is technically correct, but throughout the text I felt there was simply something missing that failed to keep me wanting to read it. Apologies in advance if other readers feel I am being vague or too subjective, but in reality it may have a lot more to do with the way I tend to personally learn, and the particular writing style this author has. Again, I remind those reading this review of my stated purpose for picking this book up in the first place: that is, priming myself on the fundamentals of the C language.

The book itself has a neo-textbook feel in that it provides programming exercises throughout the book to practice on the concepts touched upon. There are also helpful diagrams and figures that help explain subjects such as arrays and stacks.
Overall a decent piece of work.

Personally, I feel for the way I tend to learn new information, the book C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie is going to be my goto book for continuing to learn this amazing programming language.
For me, this book has a cleaner flow to it but readers totally new to programming in general might want to have a look at Practical C as it may better suit them.

C Primer Plus (5th Edition)
$54.99
I'm a freshman in college right now, and this book was required for my Intro to C class. Additionally, this is the first programming language (other than html, lol) I have ever studied.

This book might scare you a little bit when you first pick it up; it's almost a thousand pages dedicated soley to learning a language that was first formally described in 1972. This language is old, and in some ways it shows. When you start studying an aspect of C such as pointers, you might wonder why something so low-level as memory addresses ever need to be understood. Thankfully, this book takes, in their own words, a "spiral" approach to learning the language. This book does not thoroughly go through each single aspect of C, one at a time. It does not thoroughly cover every method of input, then everything about arrays, then all about pointers, etc. Rather, the authors start by introducing you to a single, simple program and go on to describe what makes that program work. They might then cover a little bit about how to get input from the user, then move on for a chapter or two, and then return to input in more detail later.

In general, the author will progress through the book by giving you a sample program, then explaining how and why it works. Wash, rinse, and repeat. This simple formula means that all of the practical methods introduced in the book are reinforced by useful and interesting theory.

In this way, the authors have taken a massive and potentially overwhelming subject and turned it into something that you can play with. The authors start by giving you a basic toolset, and keep on giving you more tools at just the right time to keep you going. By the time you get to the tenth chapter (not to mention the twentieth), you'll have enough of an understanding of how C works to look at a complex program written by any professional programmer, and at least understand what the author of that program is trying to do. You may not understand all of the tools and methods that other programmer used, but at least you will not feel completely lost looking at someone else's code.

All of the written examples in the book were tested on multiple machines with several (eleven?) different compilers, just to make sure that the programs given work as intended. I have found only two typographical errors in all my reading of the book, and both of those were noted on the publishers' website. This book is soundly fact-checked.

What else to say? As a student who plans to make the most of their education (only one shot at it, haha), I couldn't be happier.

Absolute Beginner's Guide to C (2nd Edition)
$34.99
I really love greg perry's books. They are always down to earth. This guy can teach stuff that is hard to grasp into something very simple. I have 2 books buy him and am going thru them now. I love these books.
This books is not for advanced programmers, but is for beginners for sure and even semi intermediates.
Grep Perry programming books are always a first choice for me. I know I am not going to get the academic
bable you get from some super geeks. Even though I like hard concepts you dont have to make it more hard by speaking like a geek. Greg perry rocks!

C in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))
$39.95
Look for a cow on the cover of this book. I bought this book for a C in UNIX class. The C part is great.

There is hardly a page that does not have an example or enlightening diagram. However, the only reference to applying this to UNIX is in the back where it "Practically" says that there are different versions of UNIX. It never really clamed to be a UNIX book on C. The section on unbufferd I/O has a little more on the UNIX handling of files. Over all, until something better comes along I am still using this book.