The C Programming Language,2nd Edition(English Text Version)Review

THE C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, 2nd Edition is a compact book with a B5 paper size and less than 200 pages, excluding the appendix. According to my 20 years of reading experience, one of the biggest flaws in book categorization is not distinguishing between two types of books: those you can read lying in bed before sleep, and those you can't due to their heaviness. Most computer science books belong to the latter category, but this book belongs to the former. It exudes a simple, elegant, and laid-back charm.

Incredibly, this book, starting with "Hello, World!", teaches you core C programming concepts and many essential algorithms and data structures, such as binary search, quicksort, binary trees, and hash tables, in a short and accessible format. It also tackles the complicated subject of declarations with a recursive descent parser to help with understanding.

Reading this book, you don't feel like you're being "taught" by a pedantic scholar, but rather you're casually roaming through the world of C language and UNIX system design with Kernighan and Ritchie. Their style is relaxed and practical, with examples that come effortlessly.

This is a book written by a programmer for other programmers. In contrast to the simplicity and practicality of this book, many technical authors either get bogged down in unnecessary details or lack practical experience, resulting in theoretical works that fail to be truly useful.

This review is based on a Douban user comment, which appears to be by sandrof. The review was uploaded via mobile, and some typing issues may be present. Please forgive the inconvenience.