Beginning C (5th Edition)

Any book about programming C has a problem – namely: ‘The C Programming Language’ by Kernighan and Ritchie (which I’ll just call ‘K&R’). First published in 1978, K&R has undergone a number of revisions and to this day it is still widely regarded as the definitive work on C.

K&R begins with then canonical ‘Hello world’ program and so does ‘Beginning C’. The way in which this simple program is described in the two books gives an indication of their differing approaches. K&R describes all the features of that program – its syntax, the formatting and displaying of strings, the ‘main’ function, the included library and so on – in under 3 pages. ‘Beginning C’, by contrast, devotes about 10 pages to the same topic. To be fair, it covers more ground in its discussion than you’ll find in K&R. It goes into more detail on comments, keywords and pre-processing directives. But, overall, I think I would characterise the book’s approach in general as more ‘leisurely’ than K&R.

Kernighan and Ritchie’s book functions both as a reference and a tutorial but it is generally pretty terse. It assumes that the reader will read the description of each topic and take the time to understand it without too much in the way of ‘friendly chat’ from the authors. Ivor Horton’s book is more discursive. He often spends more time describing the nitty-gritty details of how things work and he tends to give more example programs to illustrate a point. This may help to explain why his book contains 658 pages whereas K&R has around 220.

So if you are new to C, which book should you choose? The fact of the matter is that both ‘Beginning C’ and Kernighan and Ritchie’s ‘The C Programming Language’ probably cover more ground than most new C programmers will need right away, so either will do as an introduction. In my view, ‘Beginning C’ is a bit more ‘reader friendly’: it doesn’t pile on the information at quite the same pace as K&R and it has more exercises and ‘fun’ sample programs to help consolidate the information.

For more experienced programmers or people who want to learn C rapidly, K&R would be my recommendation. After all these years, the book remains a great example of a concise, clear reference and tutorial. But, if you find K&R intimidating (and many readers do!), Ivor Horton’s book may be the better choice as a gentler introduction to the C language.