Practical C Programming, 3rd Edition

Why Does 2+2=5986?

There are lots of introductory C books, but this is the first one that has the no-nonsense, practical approach that has made Nutshell Handbooks famous.

C programming is more than just getting the syntax right. Style anddebugging also play a tremendous part in creating programs that run welland are easy to maintain. This book teaches you not only the mechanics ofprogramming, but also describes how to create programs that are easy toread, debug, and update.

Practical rules are stressed. For example, there are fifteen precedencerules in C (&& comes before || comes before ?:). The practical programmerreduces these to two:

• Multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction.
  
• Put parentheses around everything else.

Contrary to popular belief, most programmers do not spend most of theirtime creating code. Most of their time is spent modifying someone elses code. This books shows you how to avoid the all-too-common obfuscated uses of C (and also to recognize these uses when you encounter them in existingprograms) and thereby to leave code that the programmer responsible formaintenance does not have to struggle with. Electronic Archaeology, the art of going through someone elses code, is described.

This third edition introduces popular Integrated Development Environments on Windows systems, as well as UNIX programming utilities, and features alarge statistics-generating program to pull together the concepts.

About the Authors
Steve Oualline lives in Southern California, where he works as a software engineer for a major phone company. In his free time he is a real engineer on the Poway Midland Railroad. Steve has written almost a dozen books on programming and Linux software. His web site is http://www.oualline.com .