Morris I. Bolsky

Coming as it does from the AT&T Bell Laboratories where the UNIX operating system and the C programming language were developed, this handbook is a definitive introduction and reference to the C programming language. It is useful for both beginning and experienced programmers.

C is a general purpose programming language featuring economy of expression, concise control and data structures, and fast execution. These features make C an ideal language for application programming as well as for system-level programming.

Although this volume is mostly a reference manual, it concludes with a "Guide for Writing Portable C Programs." Portability should be a C programmer's goal so that programs written on one platform will work on another with little or no change. Hence, readers are cautioned not to use compiler-dependent or machine-dependent features of C. The author goes on to list a series of Do's and Dont's with respect to machine-dependent features of C. The author brings this section to a close by offering several suggestions for designing well-organized programs, promising that such programs are easier to read, change, maintain, and port.… (mere)