The Most Famous Computer Programming Book In The World

In this video I will show you what is considered by many people to be the most famous computer programming book in the entire world. The book was written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and it is titled The C Programming Language.

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[AnthonyLauder]

I was born in 1965. When I was 5 years old (in 1970) my mother was in hospital giving birth to my sister. My father took me to work with him for the week (he worked in a bank) and he sat me in the computer room (a very cold room, with a huge mainframe) and asked the programmers to look after me.

They had huge stacks of punched cards containing the software they wrote, and one of the programmers was very kind and let me punch holes on spare cards just for fun. I still remember his name: John Moore. He took my cards and fed them into the computer, and told me that my cards had a mistake on them, and the job of a programmer like him was to find mistakes and fix them.

It was so fascinating for me at five years old that I became obsessed with computers and with programming. So much so, that I went on to get a degree, a masters, and a PhD in computer science, worked as programmer for many years, and eventually ran my own software company, before selling it and retiring early. I often think back to those days spent with John Moore and how they very definitely shaped my life, and my career in programming.

[georgeallen]

I went through about 85% of the problems when I was 17, and it gave me so much independence as a programmer. This was a huge relief after 7 years of failing at programming.

[soundcheck]

I learned C exclusively from the K&R book many decades ago. It is the best computer language reference book: clear, concise and complete.

[mikebauer]

I was working as a professional programmer before encountering C and UNIX (yes, I"m now old and retired). This book - and several others - lived on my nightstand and in my briefcase while I self-instructed into working-level competency. More than 30 years ago.

[niltonloboguedes]

I learned C programming language with this book 35 years ago, first edition. I still have it here in a very decent condition. I take care of it like a baby.

[southpaw]

I learned C++ in highschool (C in college) when I was 15 years old, my teacher, to which I owe my programming career, was a very very good teacher. The way she explained everything so clearly, I actually understood everything from class and didn't need to study at home, I was just programming at home with the knowledge I had from class directly. Mrs Popescu S., if you are reading this, thank you!

[greggschofield]

After graduating from the University of Liverpool with a degree in Computer Science it occured to me that I had never read a page of this book despite the fact it is considered the bible of the C programming language and the language itself is arguarbly the bridge between assembly and high-level languages such as C++, Java Python ect. I found a dusty first edition copy in the archived, still held together by cellotape, and read it front to back in a single day. Amazing book - if you can find the time to read it you will not regret!

P.S. such a fan of your channel and Udemy course on Group Theory!

[etank]

This book has held up so well, it's incredible. Pretty much every book Brian Kernighan has authored/co-authored is absolute gold. I cannot recommend enough the following 3 books of his that pair extraordinarily well with this one, those being: The Practice of Programming (Kernighan & Pike), The Unix Programming Environment (Kernighan & Pike), and The AWK Programming Language (Aho, Kernighan, & Weinberger).

The first of these is an incredibly important book because it covers the kind of programming skills that one typically only learns though (painful) experience alone since it's not typically taught well (or even at all) in school but is definitely required to develop for maturity in the craft.

The second is incredible alone in that a book published in 1984 about using a computer system from > 40 years ago is still completely (well, almost, 90% of it at least) relevant today! That is unheard of for any system outside of UNIX, which drives home the point that they really hit it out of the park over at bell labs back in the day when they designed unix - which brings me to..

The last Kernighan book I'd like to recommend is some light reading about the history of UNIX, which if anyone is unaware of is INCREDIBLY fascinating and often doesn't get the credit it deserves for being the trailblazer it was, do make sure to check out his latest book UNIX: A history and a Memoir. There's an entire section on Doug McIlroy, the ideas man behind unix pipes and the ultimate chad programmer (who makes John Carmack look like a newbie) Anyway, this guy when he wanted to use a high level language in the early pre-c assembly only days of unix, he wrote a compiler in the language of the compiler he was writing, on paper, WITH A PEN EVEN, and fed that logic on paper onto itself and typed in the resulting assembly code to get the compiler up and running!! While legend has it there were no errors at all in the process, according to Ken Thompson there were some but shockingly few and he went on to cite this boot strapping process as the greatest feat of programming he has ever witnessed in his life

EDIT: Wanted to add the above story about McIlroy I don't recall it making it into the UNIX history book but it was mentioned in a talk at 2019 Vintage Computer Festival East w/both Kernighan and Thompson, which the book does make note of as being up on youtube and provides a direct link to in the text

[salmanibrahimkhan]

Thanks for this video. I used Kris Jamsa's 'Programming in C' book to first learn C language. Our professor used it to taught us an introduction to C language as part of the course Systems Programming II in final semester in 1991. I used Stephen Bourne's 'The UNIX System V Environment' book on my own in that semester as well. That book had a chapter about C language. I used Herbert Schildt's "Teach Yourself C" book later on my own to learn in detail comparatively also.

[seankayll]

I first learned to program using "Illustrating BASIC" by Donald Alcock, which I still have. I think I was about 13 or 14 years old back in 1978/79 and I completely devoured it. I learned all of the fundamentals of variables, loops, conditions, boolean logic etc from that amazing book. My copy of K&R is the second edition (1988) that I bought in 1991. I still use it as a reference to this day. I think most people use Stack Overflow these days!

[Anonymous-qw]

Yes brings back memories for me. I also used the Kernighan and Richie book to program in C in the 1980s. I think I still have it. The first book I used to learn programming at university though was called "Pascal For Students" by R Kemp. We needed to learn programming for the Numerical Analysis and Numerical Linear Algebra courses. After university I learned COBOL and IBM Assembler for work. Python seems to be the current most popular language.

[byronservies]

When I was learning in the early 1980's PASCAL was the language of choice. My first ever special order book was Niklaus Wirth's, "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". I've read it several times and it taught me a lot. When I learned C in the late 80's, K&R was the book I studied 1 summer while being an under-utilized intern. Both are still on my shelf, along with the ANSI update to K&R.

Until very recently, my job was 100% C for the Unix kernel, which is pretty much it's last bastion. Little if any new software is started in C. Go, Rust, Python and more are all preferred these days.

[gshenaut]

I remember having a bunch of copied pages from a draft of that book stapled together when I first was learning C in the mid 70s. I was glad when the printed version became available.

[aliensoup]

C is a good foundational language to learn from the start. Many other programming languages are loosely based upon C syntax and structure, such as Java and Python, and MEL for Maya.
Pointers are an arcane concept at first, but once you get them it opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and they are important for understanding memory management.
I started programming learning Basic on a Timex/Sinclair. Then many years later that helped me to learn a scripting language for 3d graphics that used C syntax, and that helped me get a feel for C before I ever looked at it. Eventually I decided I wanted to get more serious about programming so I bought a C textbook by K.N.King, which was very good. That helped me with a lot of the concepts for delving into Objective C, and programming on Apple devices. Most people seem to want to learn programming to create games, and I discovered a great programming exercise was to write a text based version of 4 popular games : Hangman, Mastermind, Minesweeper, and Battleship - all with a graphical style output in a text console. Good luck!

[dathyr]

Wow, I agree. I still have this book in my collection of software language books from the past.
Thanks for the video.

[josephcote]

My introduction to C pointers was more or less jumping into the deep end. A college class called "Data Structures" used a fun book called "Data Structures Using C." Everything in that book used pointers, so you had to learn fast. Luckily I did, and it has been pretty useful at times.

[ghostek]

lol, im in software engineering at my university second semester ever doing computer science anything. We're learning C right now and it kind of blew my mind how integral C is to every modern language and still plays critical roles in the foundational structures of operating systems

[saiello]

Yes! I still have My original copy from uni 😁. This book is a classic. It contains everything that makes C unique and the fact that it is contained in such a relatively slim volume is testament to the beauty of its conciseness. Pointers are fundamental and to C and are its power. Master this, and you know C. It's an extremely expressive general purpose language and it can do in a line or two where other languages might take a dozen. It's sometimes been likened to a high level assembly language, but therein lies it's danger, it doesnt contain the modern protections ( such as ensuring your program isn't illegally accessing memory outside of an array bounds ) that stop an inexperienced programmer from crashing their program. As such, it compiles down to such efficient machine language that it allowed the UNIX operating system to be developed entirely in C, save for a tiny kernel that is specific to the machine it'd be running on. In fact that was why C was created, as a systems programming language for writing operating systems and compilers that need to be fast. C is also highly modular, it wastes no resources, if you need to print the results of a calculation to the screen or dump it in a file, you have to include libraries to do it. C is the syntactic precursor to many modern languages, C++, C#, Python, Java, etc. A word of warning to those wanting to learn C, this book is just a core fundamentals survey of the C programming language by its creators, it gives you the flavour of C. It will not teach you how to be a good programmer or give you a necessary understanding of those other very important aspects of programming; data structures and algorithms. Unlike other modern high level programming languages, it makes no concession to the modern ( and often castigated ) object oriented paradigm, it won't nanny you, restrict you or hold your hand. It's fundamental and raw and thats why I love it...! 😁

[sambelld]

My favourite book is “Memory as a Programming Concept in C and C++” by Frantisek Franck. The chapter on multidimensional arrays was very helpful for understanding pointers to pointers. I found the author’s style very enjoyable and informative.

[adamtki]

This is how I learned C back in the late 80's and I still have the book. It was so concise and the examples were perfect to convey the concepts. I learned pointers through this book which is why I feel I never had issues with it - the book did such a great job explaining the concept related to it.