Book Tip: “Expert C Programming” by Peter van der Linden February 22, 2009
Posted by haskelladdict in Book Tip, C programming.Tags: book, Book Tip, C programming, Expert C Programming, Peter Van Der Linden
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During the year I tend to read quite a few programming books. Similar to any other book genre, there are good ones and not so good ones. Once in a while though, I come across a real gem of the kind that makes me wish I’d read it a long time ago. Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden is one of these rare gems [1].
Van der Linden is a former developer for Sun Microsystems and has combined his real world experience with the C programming language into Expert C Programming. The book is packed with helpful insights of the kind missing from most other C books I’ve read – any serious C programmer should definitely have it on her bookshelf. Despite being published in 1994 most of the book’s advice still applies to this very day [2]. Be aware that Expert C Programming is not a C tutorial and the reader should already have a good grasp of the language to get the most out of it. So, if you’ve ever wondered why
file1.c:
int foobar[100];
file2.c:
extern int *foobar; /* piece of code that does something with foobar */
won’t work go get yourself a copy of Expert C Programming.
References
[1] http://www.afu.com
[2] Interestingly, C99 does address some of the C shortcomings discussed in the book.
Thankyou for putting this book into my incresingly long todo list. How would you compare this book to the classic book The C Programming book
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Work is crazy these days. I presume you are referring to “The C programming language” by Kernighan and Ritchie? I would say that in contrast
to the latter, “Expert C Programming” does not attempt to teach
you C from the ground up. Rather, it was written for already failry experienced C programmers to help them avoid common pitfalls,
subtleties in the language, and increase their in depth understanding of the C programming language.
Yes that was the book I was referring to, thanks for the reply.
Ahh damn you for leave me hanging. Why does that not work exactly?
[...] by haskelladdict in C programming, Linux. Tags: array, C, C programming, pointer trackback In a post in February I posted the following piece of code [...]
@Oliver
I’ve just posted a new entry that gives more detail – I hope it makes sense.