C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie; Prentice Hall; 0-13-110163-3; 0-13-110362-8.

Amazon.com reviews -- Just about every C programmer I respect learned C from this book. Unlike many of the 1,000 page doorstops stuffed with CD-ROMs that have become popular, this volume is concise and powerful (if somewhat dangerous) -- like C itself. And it was written by Kernighan himself. Need we say more?

...A high-intensity tutorial and a great reference... The book was a trendsetter in several ways. For example, the very first exercise given is to print "hello, world"; this is now seen as the first exercise in innumerable other, more recent books, many of which may not realize that they are borrowing from K&R. ...the real value of this book is in the tutorial approach: it is a rare pleasure in the computing field to find a book that is simultaneously clear, stimulating and informative.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Classic C, K&R, New Testament.