C Programming: A Modern Approach

by Kimberly Nelson King

Book Overview

Professor King's spiral approach made it accessible to a broad range of readers, from beginners to more advanced students. With adoptions at over 225 colleges, the first edition was one of the leading C textbooks of the last ten years. The second edition maintains all the book's popular features and brings it up to date with coverage of the C99 standard. The new edition also adds a significant number of exercises and longer programming projects, and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393979504
• ISBN13: 9780393979503
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 864 Pages
• Weight: 2.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Learning C is easy with this book

This is the second of King's books I have purchased. It is also the second that I am very very pleased with. This book presents a quick systematic clear way of learning to program in C period. This has to be the easiest programming book I have ever read that goes beyond absolute basics. Frankly I don't understand the few negative reviews others have given the book. Yes it would have been nice to have answers to the exercises. However this is a programming book, you get the answers yourself by doing the work. Mistakes are readily apparent, simply because it won't work! In terms of difficulty, the exercises are doable. There have been a few that did stump me.....for a little while. With a bit of rereading and some experimenting, I have managed to answer all that I have attempted. Do yourself a favor if you are learning C and buy the book either as a stand alone or as a supplement to another book.

The excelence in writing

In the short period of time I've been in programming I've had a chance to read a variety of programming tutorials as well as references covering several different languages, no other book I've read in any programming langage from any author comes close to this one. This book covers the entire C language in a very clearly explained, to the point, and entertaining manner. This book is both an excelant tutorial as well as a very usefull C language referance. After reading this book you'll know all you need to know to get into C programming. Every time you read this book you'll become more of a C language guru, for there is a lot on every page and even between the lines.

For the Serious Student or Up-and-coming C Programmer

I have browsed some C and C++ books in major bookstores to see how the materials are organized and presented. This one was not a book I had a chance to browse, but one which I had to buy for an extension course (Introductory C Programming) at UCLA last summer.At first I thought King's book was hard because of a certain depth of penetration into elements of good programming practices with examples one after another. As I became serious and started to reading intently, I found out how effective King was in paving the way toward a comprehensive understanding of C programming through worked out code and annotations. King is very skilled in breaking down and building up C code, unlike certain celebrated C programming language experts who apparently do not care to be clear or are simply ineffective. So my conclusion is: Read this each chapter of this book very closely, carefully and seriously, and try to understand every last point King is raising. Also, do not neglect working out some of his exercises at the end of each chapter for the benefit of practice as well as learning C. In almost every chapter of the book, he gives very good, organized and annotated but not tedious and complex examples. The problems are generally reasonable and hardly ever too complicated because I never found them overwhelming, either from a coding perspective or mathematically. Perhaps it is because King comes across as someone who emphasizes organization, detail, clarity and explanation in his style of presentation. There are no problems dealing with heavy scientific or engineering applications for those who dread them.Great points: (1) Fundamentals - beginning chapters goes into detail for a solid grounding of C language basics (syntax, etc.); and (2) Pointers - excellent exposition with examples, diagrams and exercises, extremely well presented for the starters who easily get confused by what pointers in C are all about; and (3) Ideas are very well connected from chapter to chapter -- some chapters are even as great as stand-alone ones for referencing. The only problems I found were: (1) Description of struct types, which are passed by value from function to function -- implied but not clearly or succintly stated in the book (compare the description in the excellent book by Kelley and Pohl, "A Book in C"); (2) Chapter on program design, which I found to be very terse and scanty in terms of information topics about designing medium size to large C programs -- also jumps into encapsulation and C++ too soon and leaves out one too many basic ideas in C program organization -- "Look before you leap", C++ is object-oriented, and is therefore much more complex and evolved, so why do too much of C++ when one must learn basics of ANSI C well beforehand!For some reason, I feel strongly that King is following the writing style and presentation of the classical work in C programming by Kernighan and Ritchie. He even discusses the sign

Can't get any better or luckier than this!

I had the unsual opportunity and privilege to learn C from this book and directly taught by the author himself. K.N.King has mastered not only the art of C programming but also the art of communicating his knowledge of the subject even to the least common experienced programmer(believe me, I have first hand experience with the author. and Boy I do miss all those office hours!) The book is internationally appealing(It is used in many countries by programmers of all levels) It really stands head and shoulder above the rest of all of them. It's unique in its spiral approach to the subject.It also does a pretty good job of shutting out all the critics who claim that you can't be a big shot C programmer right out of college. Not if you read this book from cover to cover and stop complaining about page 30 exercise #5!