C Programming: A Modern Approach Second Edition

I am a first-year comp sci student (although I have a degree in an unrelated field) who was due to start an algorithm/problem solving class that would be focused on C. Although the class had no assigned textbook, I figured if I'm going to be using C, I'd better learn what I'm doing. I had tried previously to learn C with K&R, but I didn't make much progress. Too many of the programming practice problems given in K&R were frankly just too difficult for a beginner who is self-teaching. I decided to pick up another textbook. After extensive research, King's book seemed to be one of the most consistently and highly recommended.I started working through King's book a couple weeks before the class started to try and keep ahead of the class material. I can't say enough good things about this textbook. It is thorough but clear, and includes plenty of code examples to learn from. The programming exercises are just challenging enough to push you a bit beyond your comfort zone without feeling impossible, and there are many interesting problems to pick and choose from. There's enough material so that you can find many common standard library functions or core C concepts referenced over and over throughout the book. This really helps to see how the guts of C work in different contexts. The writing style is pleasant. King manages to keep what most would consider a very dry subject entertaining and fun, without losing any of the rigor you'd expect from a textbook. That's quite an achievement.Thanks partially to this book I finished the class with a perfect 100% score.

Mr. King explains C with specific callouts to C89 vs. C99, important idioms to be aware of, and answers to frequently asked questions, with greater attention to detail than any other book I've read on any programming language. If you want to really know C, this is your book. Read every chapter is succession, do every exercise and programming project, and you will be proficient in C. Truthfully, I did not take that approach, as my goal was to establish a foundational understanding of C in order to pursue Objective-C programming. So I read the book nearly cover to cover, did most of the exercises and programming projects early on and just read the text in later chapters, and skipped what I knew would not be applicable to my Objective-C pursuits, and I walked away with a solid foundation in C. If your goal is to develop in C or any variant such as Objective-C, C++, etc., I would highly recommend starting with this book, and in the case of Objective-C, continuing with Robert Clair's Learning Objective-C 2.0: A Hands-On Guide to Objective-C for Mac and iOS Developers.

I was using Zed Shaw's Learn C The Hard Way and realized that the hard way doesn't build up a good foundation of knowledge. I needed something that I can use to learn some basic aspects of the C language and this does the job. Not only is it well written and approachable, there are numerous end of chapter exercises that allow you to implement chapter specific techniques. I respect Zed's approach, but sometimes things need to taken out of context of the bigger picture to appreciate the constructs.Later on in the book, KN King tackles on some C standard library specifics header by header. I appreciate how I can quickly figure out what each function of the standard library does after reading the back of the book reference. The chapter on the C Preprocessor has allowed me to make some pretty cool macros and understand how they all unwind. In addition, good practices are also mentioned, although not as frequent as in Zed Shaw's book. All in all KN King really does elucidate the language with this book.

I am a novice C programmer. I've taken half a dozen courses on different languages. I've taken several courses on C. This book has great content and covers the right topics. The exercises are mostly understandable but, some I couldn't figure out what the problem was looking for. About 1/3 of the answers to the exercises are available at the provided URL at the beginning of the book. The answers to programming projects however are not available. To make matters worse, the projects ask that you modify programs that you don't have access to. To complete the problem, you have to retype in several pages of code. This is nuts! I emailed the author and he didn't reply for the rest of the answers. Lastly, whatever ink they used to print the book smells which is a bit distracting when reading it for hours. Overall, glad I purchased this book because I'm learning.