Need to learn C, best books?

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 13:28 +0100, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Hi All,
>  The more I work with Perl modules that use a lot of C, the more I find 
> the need to learn C.
> I've seen the Perl for C programmers book, but I want a C for Perl 
> programmers book.
> 
> Is there a C programming book equivalent to "Learning Perl" by Randal? 
> I've read several Perl books, but when I finally picked up a copy of 
> Learning Perl is was obvious to me that I had wasted time on the other 
> Perl introductory books.
> 

I'd go with the recommendations for K&R - it's slim size is an
indication of how little there is of the language to learn. The only
other C book I ever had was a really weird little thing "C and <some
other language which I can't remember> in parallel" but there has been a
lot of booze in the intervening twenty years and I can't remember
anything else about it. 

> Also is there a C equivalent to PerlMonks and PerlM[ou]ngers?

I doubt it.  The closest thing C ever had to a "community" was
comp.lang.c and there you'd get flamed within an inch of your life if
there was even the slightest hint that you were talking about something
that wasn't in the language or standard library specifications. Not that
there's anything wrong with that. As everything from ten line utilities
to programming language interpreters and compilers to operating systems
and hardware control programs are written in C, it probably makes more
sense if these keep to their domain specific areas. Just because you
happen to be using a language Y to do X doesn't mean your question is
about Y - this is far more clear with C because it is in itself so tiny
and tightly scoped.

/J\