Moe said:
I am starting to learn C.
One friend has recommended a book called K&R (full title "C Programming
Language"). However another friend told me that the C language has
recently been up-dated so this book is now outofdate and I should save my
money for a new edition of same.
My question is: dose anyone know if the authors (Kernerghan and Richie)
are planning a new edition, if so when will it be released. Also will it
be available for Kindle.
First of all, there are two editions of that book. If you buy
it make sure you get the second edition (from 1989 or later).
But I guess that finding the first edition is getting difficult
- there where some times were it was important to check what
one ordered, but that probably isn't much of an issue anymore.
And there's not going to be any new edition by the authors -
Dennis Ritchie (the 'R' in K&R) died last year. On the other
hand most of what you will find in the second edition is still
valid. There are a number of things that have been added to C
since the book did appear, there were two new standards, C99
and C11, but once you have worked through the book I would
guess it's not a big problem to also learn the stuff that has
been added since then (compilers that support all of C99 and,
even more, all of the C11 features are still very scarce).
K&R is, IMHO, one of the best-written programming books, so
even if it might be a bit outdated (but not that much) it's
still worth reading (and no, I don't get anything for praising
that book, I just learned C from it about 20 years ago and was
very happy with it and haven't read any other book about a
programming languages since then that I would consider to be
superior). Of course, it was written for people which already
have some experience with programming. So it's not a book that
is meant to get you started on programming - then the learning
curve might be a bit too steep. If you never wrote a program
and never used a compiler some book that gets you through the
very first steps might be oreferable and only after that K&R
is what you should be looking into.
And, finally, I don't have any information if that book is
going to become available in electronic form (be it for the
Kindle or whatever else). But since it is, with less than 280
pages, a rather slim book (compared to the tomes that are ne-
cessary for other languages) it's not much of a problem to
lug it around (it weights less than 500 g but the informa-
tion-to-weight ratio is unusally high;-)
Regards, Jens
)