I learned C from this book way back in 1991. It's about 40 pages. I still use it today. To me - that is a 5 star book. ( )

It's a slightly interesting historical work, but any book on C predating the release of even the first ISO standard on C in 1989 can't be more than that. ( )

Coming as it does from the AT&T Bell Laboratories where the UNIX operating system and the C programming language were developed, this handbook is a definitive introduction and reference to the C programming language. It is useful for both beginning and experienced programmers.

C is a general purpose programming language featuring economy of expression, concise control and data structures, and fast execution. These features make C an ideal language for application programming as well as for system-level programming.

Although this volume is mostly a reference manual, it concludes with a "Guide for Writing Portable C Programs." Portability should be a C programmer's goal so that programs written on one platform will work on another with little or no change. Hence, readers are cautioned not to use compiler-dependent or machine-dependent features of C. The author goes on to list a series of Do's and Dont's with respect to machine-dependent features of C. The author brings this section to a close by offering several suggestions for designing well-organized programs, promising that such programs are easier to read, change, maintain, and port. ( )