The C Programming Language

"Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'.
When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A,
we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B,
BCPL and finally C."
--Ken Tompson

The C - Programming language has probably influenced the IT world the at most. The history of C is closely connected with the evolution of UNIX. But C is not only the system programming language of UNIX any more. C is available on almost any conputer system of present days. If one would do a survey on the most widely used languages in operational software of today, C would still be very high up, possibly on top. The C Programming Language is not only covered, because C is a subset of C++, but also because C is a real milestone in IT history and although it's most glorious days are over I believe it is still a great language to learn. Millions of programmers are still sweating and swearing when using it, but what would we be without it?

Benefits of using C

The C grammar is very easy to learn. Once the beginner has really understood, what a pointer is and the implication of the use and misuse of it, it is not a hard language for programming.
C is "very close to the machine". This is, why it is still the only language for Kernel Programming, esspecially device drivers.
Since C is close to the machine, it is always transparent what the program does. You never get lost, like in a Java program.-)
There is a standard. C is portable.
A huge number of developers and contributers made it to one of the best known programming languages, with a vast number of books, tutorials, example programs on the WWW, newsgroups, discussion forum and enthusiast all over the world.

Literature

The "Old Testament" The C Programming Language. 1st Edition. I am not sure, if it is still available in bookshops. I have a copy, but of course I would never give it away.

The "New Testament" The C Programming Language. 2nd Edition. It contains all ANSI relevant rules and extension. For real work, it is the better choice anyway.

The book I started with.
Very good.

A very good reference on the C - Standard Library is given in "C - A Reference Manual" (Harbison/Steele)

Platforms

All Unix based systems
All Windows Systems
Many more

C++ World