Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Professor King's spiral approach made it accessible to a broad range of readers, from beginners to more advanced students. With adoptions at over 225 colleges, the first edition was one of the leading C textbooks of the last ten years.The second edition maintains all the book's popular features and brings it up to date with coverage of the C99 standard. The new edition also adds a significant number of exercises and longer programming projects, and includes extensive revisions and updates.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Introducing C
• 1.1 History of C
• Origins
• Standardization
• C++
• 1.2 Strengths and Weaknesses of C
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Effective Use of C
• 2 C Fundamentals
• 2.1 Writing a Simple Program
• Program: Printing a Pun
• Compiling and Linking
• 2.2 The General Form of a Simple Program
• Directives
• Functions
• Statements
• Printing Strings
• 2.3 Comments
• 2.4 Variables and Assignment
• Types
• Declarations
• Assignment
• Printing the Value of a Variable
• Program
• Computing the Dimensional Weight of a Box
• Initialization
• Printing Expressions
• 2.5 Reading Input Program: Computing the Dimensional Weight of a Box (Revisited)
• 2.6 Defining Constants Program: Converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius
• 2.7 Identifiers
• Keywords
• 2.8 Layout of a C Program
• 3 Formatted Input/Output
• 3.1 The printf Function Conversion Specifications
• Program: Using printf to Format Numbers
• Escape Sequences
• 3.2 The scanf Function How scanf Works
• Ordinary Characters in Format Strings
• Confusing printf with scanf
• Program: Computing the Value of Stock Holdings
• 4 Expressions
• 4.1 Arithmetic Operators
• Operator Precedence and Associativity
• Program: Computing a UPC Check Digit
• 4.2 Assignment Operators Simple Assignment
• Lvalues
• Compound Assignment
• 4.3 Increment and Decrement Operators
• 4.4 Expression Evaluation Order of Subexpression Evaluation
• 4.5 Expression Statements
• 5 Selection Statements
• 5.1 Logical Expressions Relational Operators
• Equality Operators
• Logical Operators
• 5.2 The if Statement Compound Statements
• The else Clause
• Cascaded if Statements
• Program: Calculating a Broker's Commission
• The 'Dangling else' Problem
• Conditional Expressions
• Boolean Values
• 5.3 The switch Statement The Role of the break Statement
• Program: Printing a Date in Legal Form
• 6 Loops
• 6.1 The while Statement Infinite Loops
• Program: Printing a Table of Squares
• Program: Summing a Series of Numbers
• 6.2 The do Statement Program: Calculating the Number of Digits in an Integer
• 6.3 The for Statement for Statement Idioms
• Omitting Expressions in a for Statement
• The Comma Operator
• Program: Printing a Table of Squares (Revisited)
• 6.4 Exiting from a Loop
• The break Statement
• The continue Statement
• The goto Statement
• Program: Balancing a Checkbook
• 6.5 The Null Statement
• 7 Basic Types
• 7.1 Integer Types Integer Constants
• Reading and Writing Integers
• Program: Summing a Series of Numbers (Revisited)
• 7.2 Floating Types
• Floating Constants
• Reading and Writing Floating-Point Numbers
• 7.3 Character Types
• Escape Sequences
• Character-Handling Functions
• Reading and Writing Characters
• Program: Determining the Length of a Message
• 7.4 The sizeof Operator
• 7.5 Type Conve

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

C++ is a "hot" computer language, and many books are available--even though many C++ courses are really C courses in which the C++ I/O (cin and cout) are used. But C is still the king of languages (and even in C++, the "insides" of objects are written in C). Thus it is that a book for teaching C is as relevant as ever. This new edition (1st ed., 1996) of a previous work is excellent. King (Georgia State Univ.) states that one of his goals is to provide a work that readers could use all by themselves to learn the language. That viewpoint not only makes the book valuable for a library to have on its shelves, but also makes it more helpful for students. C Programming emphasizes standard versions of C, used on many machines, and writing for portability across platforms. Sidebars point out features in GNU's GCC compiler--a quality product, free for many computers--so anyone can learn cheaply. King covers old standards as well as the new C99. Appendixes provide references to the different standards as well as the standard library functions. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. R. P. Sarna Maine Maritime Academy