The C Answer Book: Solutions to the Exercises in 'The C Programming Language,' Second Edition

As a student learning C for the first time, this book and the accompanying book by Kernighan and Ritchie were decent books and I would recommend them. Yet despite this, I believe there are alternative books which would have made the learning experience at first much easier. If you have zero experience with programming or C in general, C Programming Absolute Beginner's Guide by Greg Perry and Dean Miller would be the best place to start. It does not get any simpler than this and the book is written with this in mind. Head First C by David Griffiths is another recommendation which is beginner friendly. Plenty of visual representations with a sense of humor to keep you interested. Straight forward and easy to follow.

To be honest, haven't really used this book because I haven't really needed to, but I'm sure it's great and very helpful.

Through Amazon, or affiliated vendors, I have bought the following: The C Programming Language, by K&R, The C Programming Language, 2nd edition, by K&R, The C Answer Book, by Tondo, and the Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. I believe that I now have an excellent set of books to help me re-learn and perhaps finally master the C language. I should have done this 30 years ago. I consider the original book, The C Programming Language, to be a collector's item and am extremely happy with the service from Amazon and affiliates in helping me acquire my treasure. For novices, the C Programming Language was written by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, both then at AT&T, Bell Labs, to be used to write the Unix operating system in the late 60s, early 70s. Both C and Unix (and Unix clones, AKA Linux) are widely used and worth knowing. Looking forward to some good reading!

This is a nice companion to the K&R book. Note that you can find online web sites that give solutions too, but sometimes they use libraries or concepts not yet covered by the K&R, whereas the answer book, for the most part stays at about the same gradient as the corresponding K&R page number. It also uses a fairly similar approach as the examples in K&R. Explanations are fairly short, but helpful. One thing it doesn't have (though the questions it answers don't really ask for it), is a working main function to test drive the solutions. In a way, this is a nice study to learn more about the topics but can be frustrating in the pointers section (see 'An aside' below). I purchased this book used for around $7. I don't think I would purchase a new copy for a solutions book -- the condition was quite acceptable when it arrived even thought the seller described it as being in dismal condition. Got lucky I guess. That being said, if you're really serious about learning C, I would think this would be a worthwhile additional purchase to K&R. FWIW, C Programming All-in-one and C in a nutshell books have also been helpful to me. An aside: As a newbie, I started using char *someParam = "a literal" and then I'd get an error when passing this as an arg to a (char *s) parameter if/when the function needed to 'manipulate' the string. I'm still not sure if I understand this correctly, but it seems that mutable strings need to be declared char [SOME_SIZE]someString = "a literal". Since arrays are pointers, this works as an arg to the (char *s) and the function will be able to manipulate the string. I mention this because the solutions would crash unless I did this!

Very good book. Very useful if you want to check or improve your C. The book you should have beside the second edition of K & R, C Programming. Dan

Needed for us self taught programmers. I want to be able to check my solutions for accuracy.

Awesome book for c programming

The value in this book is not the answers themselves, but the explanations of why these are the answers. If you are having trouble grasping the finer points of pointers, this is the place to clear that up. Short, succinct, and focused.