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UnixReview.com
December 2005
Book Review: C Primer Plus,
Fifth Edition
Reviewed by Ed Schaefer
C Primer Plus, Fifth Edition
Stephen Prata
Sams Publishing, 2005
ISBN: 0672326965
959 pages
In the 1980s, there was a spate of books that taught "C" programming. Most
have fallen into disuse, but Stephen Prata's C Primer Plus continues
to thrive. With more than half a million copies sold, this text deserves to
be called a classic.
Before Windows or other GUIs, we learned "C" from the command line —
regardless of whether the OS was MS-DOS or Unix. In the Getting Ready chapter,
this text retains the classic edit-compile-link-execute cycle typical of command-line
use. Although Prata mentions the Window's IDE and Metroworks CodeWarrior compiler
on the Macintosh, if you want to learn "C" from a specific IDE, I suggest looking
elsewhere.
As you would expect from a beginning text, Prata starts at the
simple (program structure, "C" data type, etc.)
and leads us to the complex (file input/output, pointers, structures, etc.).
This book has "Plus" in the title because in the later chapters, the
author explains link lists, queues, and binary search trees — topics
beyond the typical introductory text.
For more information, see the table of contents.
Getting the Source
This book originally was published before any "C" ANSI standard existed, but
the fifth edition's examples are compliant with the current C99 "C"
standard.
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