The C Book (HTML Book on C)

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/c_book/c_book/index.html

by mahmud • 16 years ago

92 20 16 years ago

phy.duke.edu

vog• 16 years ago

It's always great when a good book is released under a free license. This should be the normal case for all books that are out of print.

Unfortunately, most books simply vanish and/or have an unclear legal status.

euroclydon• 16 years ago

What's up with the printer friendly version? It doesn't work for me.

telemachos3• 16 years ago

Good to know it's not just me. (Chrome dev 6.0.458.1 and Safari both no-go on OSX 10.6.4.)

MarkBook2• 16 years ago

Do you have no feelings at all for your fellow man? :(

blue1• 16 years ago

http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/?format=pf

aarongough3• 16 years ago

Awesome timing. I'm just starting to contemplate porting the prototype VM i'm working on to C. Thanks Mahmud! You seem to be coming to the rescue often these days :-p

jfr2• 16 years ago

The book is from 1991, almost 20 years ago. There is a lot of outdated information. You should perhaps look for something more recent, that covers C99 and features commonly found on current compilers.

aarongough3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the heads-up. Is C really that different now that I need to worry about it? I have done some work in C++ before, but that was many years ago and I've grown accustomed to high-level languages...

timthorn• 16 years ago

I was given this book for my 15th birthday - it rescued me from Sinclair Basic! It may be old but it's a very readable C tutorial and won't lead people far astray.

telemachos3• 16 years ago

A quick question: the book (at least early on) advocates this for main:

    # implied int; implied void
    main() {
        # whatever
        exit(0) # or EXIT_SUCCESS
    }

Is this simply a stylistic choice (rather than a more explicit int main(void) and return(0)). I'm mostly curious, but I know that how to deal with main can be a sacred cow.

Edit: And sure enough clang (by default) and gcc (with -Wall) both issue warnings.

johnswamps• 16 years ago

The book was written 20 years ago, before the C99 spec was released. main() was acceptable but discouraged in C89, which is why -Wall (or more precisely -Wimplicit-int) displays a warning. It's disallowed by the C99 spec and will always give you a warning.

kngspook• 16 years ago

The OP's link looks like an HTML dump of http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/ , which I'm pretty sure is the original...

(And there's also a PDF of all the pages, linked to from the gbdirect version, http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/the_c_book.pdf ; for those of you having trouble with the printer-friendly version.)

wizzard19• 16 years ago

Here's the official GNU C book: http://www.htu.tugraz.at/~past/ctut/ctut.pdf

The C Book (HTML Book on C)

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