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Ask HN: I want to have a basic familiarity with C, shoudl I read K&R?

3 points by walrus_pen ↗ HN
I don't plan (at this time) to use C professionally, but I do feel like understanding C well would benefit me professionally (I mostly do Typescript/JS)

I've been trying to settle on a good text to get a "good enough" understanding of C but many of them are much longer than I am motivated to invest in at this time, while K&R is very succinct/short.

5 comments

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ThrowawayR2
I like K&R but it's so incredibly dated that it would be like reading the HTML 2.0 spec (from '95) to understand web frontend development today. Wouldn't recommend it.
walrus_pen
Thanks for the feedback! Any more brief texts that you recommend?
ThrowawayR2
The common suggestion seems to be Gustedt's "Modern C" (https://modernc.gforge.inria.fr/) which is available in print but has a free ebook version. Just stop at the end of chapter 14 and it's probably around the same length as K&R. It's a bit heavy-handed on the prescriptiveness for my taste but decent material.
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