C books (was "K&R C book wanted")

[Jason Stokes]

James Macnicol wrote:
> 
> > Anyone have a copy of Kernighan & Ritchie C (2nd ed) they are willing to part with?
> >
> > The CoOp lists it for $90 (members' price).
> > Make an offer, I'm willing to negotiate...
> >
> > I need it for COMP2310. (and as a general essential reference)
> 
>   A friend of mine is trying to learn 'C', primarily for the work he
> is doing at the moment.  We went looking around bookshops in the city
> late last week.  I was rather shocked to see how little was available
> for books that just discussed 'C'.  There are plenty of books about C#
> and C++ but I think we only saw five or six pure 'C' titles all up
> (and no copies of K&R at all).

I think the assumption is that everyone these days will want to learn
C++, which is almost (no holy war will correspondance will be entered
into) a perfect superset of C anyway.   Most new pure C code I see (eg,
everything in the GTK and Gnome project) which is coded in C seems to
emulate C++ features like classes and polymorphism to a greater or
lesser extent  -- indeed, the whole design of the basic Unix API could
be considered an emulation of "object oriented" concepts (everything's a
file, with various specialisations for particular /kinds/ of file)
before C++ was available.

So, ironically, you can gain a greater understanding of a lot of the C
code you see by learning C++.