(e-mail address removed) spoke thus:
Never read the book, but I bet one can glean more "deep C secrets"
from the Gandalf-like wizards that haunt this newsgroup than from that
book.
I would be very, very surprised if most of the "Gandalf-like wizards"
around here have not read this book already.
When you want to get beyond beginner's books, and even more advanced
"how-to" books, and become a disciplined producer of production
quality code in C, then you need the books that can show you what can
go wrong and how to keep it from happening.
There are three books in that category that I class as excellent, and
one of them is Van Der Linden's.
The other two are Andrew Koenig's "C Traps and Pitfalls", and Les
Hatton's "Safer C: Developing Software in High-integrity and
Safety-critical Systems".
About two years ago a brand new Border's book store opened in my town.
On my first visit, I browsed through the programming section to see
what had been selected to initially stock the shelves.
Of course there were large numbers of the "book-du-jour", but I was
quite pleased to see that many of the classics were on the shelf in
the C section, including:
--K&R2
--Harbison & Steele
--Van Der Linden's book.
--Koenig's book
--Steve Summit's book version of the comp.lang.c FAQ.
The only one that's really hard to get, at least in the US, is
Hatton's book, even though it is one every serious C programmer should
read.
It was voted the most important book on C (excepting K&R) of the 20th
century a few years ago by an ACCU conference.
You can't even order from US Internet book dealers, but you can from
amazon.co.uk or Blackwells in the UK.
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