Programming Forums - C In A Nutshell - A Desktop Quick Reference

Title: C In A Nutshell - A Desktop Quick Reference
Author: Peter Prinz & Tony Crawford
Publisher: O'REILLY
ISBN: 0-596-00697-7
Price (NEW): $40.00 (USD) / $56.00 (CAD)

Review:

I've only been learning C for the past two months, but I have already been programming some useful applications. I give credit to this one book I have been reading, that covers virtually everything in the C language with a tolerable degree of depth.

I learned from The O'Reilly book "C In A Nutshell". It includes information from both the C89 and C99 standards. However, I'll include a little snippet from the book as a warning:

Quote:

This book is not an introduction to programming in C. Althought it covers the fundamentals of the language, it is not organized or witten as a tutorial. If you are new to C, we assume that you have read at least one of the many introductory books, or that you are familiar with a related language, such as Java or C++.

Keeping that in mind, this was the only resource I used for C. It served mainly as material for learning from code snippets, and reading up on the technicalities of certain concepts. Even though it's not meant as a tutorial, there is still some very important information. The non-tutorialistic method of serving the information is regrettably annoying in some sections, but this may be a good thing for some people! The significant benefit, obviously, is it is a wealth of very useful information.

The titles of all 20 chapters are as follows: Language Basics, Types, Literals, Type Conversions, Expressions and Operators, Statements, Functions, Arrays, Pointers, Structure Unions and Bit-Fields, Declarations, Dynamic Memory Management, Input and Output, Preprocessing Directives, The Standard Headers, Functions at a Glance, Standard Library Functions, Compiling with GCC, Using make to Build C Programing, Debugging with GDB.

Each chapter covers everything involved with the topic, and if you've ever read anything as heavy as an Algorithms book, you'll find this very easy to follow. Just make sure you aren't learning this without any previous understanding of C or a similar language!

This book does not get in to Graphical User Interfaces, Networking, nor any other subject-matter that can be separated from the fundamental basics of the language.

Rating: 4/5.
It's very concise and readable, but lacking in tutorial-like organization.