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Comment by olivierestsage | Hacker News Reader

Would anyone have an up-to-date book recommendation for someone looking to learn C? Is K&R still the best way, or are much more recent things like Modern C [1] the way to go? I am concerned that if I learn techniques that are too "modern," I might not be able to contribute to open source projects that employ older conventions.

[1] https://modernc.gforge.inria.fr/

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I still consider K&R to be "the" book to learn and appreciate C. Over two decades, I have seen/read several books, but keep coming back to K&R. It isn't just about the language that makes K&R great -- along with the ride also comes valuable (programming) life lessons, experience with terse language (minimum words to express maximum thought), and a lot of historical perspective that most modern books omit.

I would also recommend using the Steve Summit's "C Programming Notes" as you work your way through K&R. Pay attention to the "deep sentences". https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/krnotes/top.html

And don't skip the exercises at the end of each chapter. The discover of solving the exercises on your own is a revelation that far surpasses any benefit obtained by being told how to do it! :-)

https://nostarch.com/Effective_C

This seems promising, would be nice to hear what HN thinks of it

I just read it and like it very much, especially for its brevity and because it is on-point. If you have experience with low level languages, pointers, memory and actually have some programming experience, then this is your book, especially because it is so up-to-date.

But I would not recommend it to someone, who has no experience and wants to learn C as a first language.

Learn Rust first, then go read someone's C codebase.

Maybe consult https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming for any syntax you don't recognize.

Just go with K&R of the latest edition. It gets you into the mood. Concerning modern techniques I don't really understand what that would be.

The latest K&R edition is from 1988, C has changed quite a lot since then... especially with C99 which almost feels like a new and much friendlier language because of the new initialization features (compound literals and designated init).

Modern C: "use Rust instead".

Modern C: don't use Rust, use regular C and incrementally wrap & migrate it to ATS[1][2]

[1] http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML/...

[2] http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML/...

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