Practical C Programming
by Steve Oualline · first published 1991
88% recommend13% critical
Why HN recommends it
A short, practical introduction to C that is easy to follow without being oversimplified. It serves as a first programming book and a good way to learn the language.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
C programming is more than just getting the syntax right. Style and debugging also play a tremendous part in creating programs that run well and are easy to maintain, as Oualline reveals. This edition covers Windows IDEs and UNIX programming utilities.
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The clearest statement of this I have seen is from the O'Reilly book Practical C Programming : "* and / come before + and -. Use parentheses for everything else." My general rule, on the rare occasions that I actually write code, is the same as for other writing - write to be easily understood…
on “Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules” ↗Practical C Programming by Steve Oualline (O'reilly Press) is maybe my favorite beginning coding books of all time, and definitely the best introduction to C I've encountered to date.
on “Ask HN: Best beginner book for C programming?” ↗Back in the day, I really enjoyed "Practical C Programming". https://www.amazon.de/Practical-C-Programming-Nutshell-Handb... Short, easy to understand, but not over-simplified, and a practical, pragmatic approach to everything.
on “What are must read books for entry level C programmer?” ↗…Programing" [1], which is a pretty good book. A lot of programmers believe this, too. I think the concept has merit (without taking it to extremes, of course). [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-c-programming...
on “GitHub Classroom” ↗…failed to resonate with me. The problems have always seemed like the type you’d run into if you were the kind of person writing an operating system… in the 70’s… on a minicomputer. I learned C from “Practical C Programming” by Steve Oualline. I remember reading it on bus rides home from work and just itching to try out the code myself. I loved that the author motivated many of the exercises with the weird corners of C that…
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?” ↗I am surprised to see nobody mention Practical C Programming (https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Programming-Does-Nutshell-H...) by Steve Oualline. Before I studied computer science in school, I read this book and successfully taught myself C. Readers here may consider…
on “Ask HN: Best book to learn C in 2022?” ↗Practical C Programming was my introduction text into the world of programming and I found it to be very good. K&R is also a great book if you want to start C
on “In honor of Dennis Ritchie, 50% off all C/C++ ebooks” ↗these changed almost everything i think about: misc. Forrest Mims notebooks, the Python Tutorial, Practical C Programming first chapter of Sound and the Fury, snippets of Naked Lunch, wide swaths of Ulysses The Universe in a Nutshell, French's Special Relativity The Gamma Function, a graph theory text whose name i don't…
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗This list is unfortunately missing the O'Reilly-published "Practical C++ Programming" by Steve Oualline, which is a truly terrible text, and the only O'Reilly book I actively tell people to burn. It's filled with errors, code samples riddled with syntax errors, and non-idiomatic style.
on “C Books and C++ Books You Don't Want ” ↗> Now would you rather have code that is having a bug but is readable or having code that is incomprehensible but afaik I don't know the answer myself, but the "Practical C Programming" book argues that clear code that doesn't work is preferable to unclear code which works but is hard to understand (because of its messiness). This is because you understand what's wrong about the clear…
on “Maslow's Pyramid of Code Review (2015)” ↗