15 Excellent Free Books to Learn C

Last Updated on June 14, 2023

10. Essential C by Nick Parlante

This Stanford CS Education is a fairly brief document which explains all the common features and techniques for C. The coverage is pretty quick, so it is targeted at a programmer with a background in another language.

Topics include variables, int types, floating point types, promotion, truncation, operators, control structures (if, while, for), functions, value parameters, reference parameters, structs, pointers, arrays, the pre-processor, and the standard C library functions.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction.
• Basic Types and Operators.
• Control Structures.
• Complex Data Types.
• Functions.
• Odds and Ends.
• Advanced Arrays and Pointers.
• Operators and Standard Library Reference.

The author’s description indicates this book is issued under an open-source like license.

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11. Beej’s Guide to C Programming by Brian “Beej” Hall

Beej’s Guide to C Programming tries to lead the reader from complete and utter sheer lost confusion on to the sort of enlightened bliss that can only be obtained though pure C programming.

Chapters:

• Programming Building Blocks.
• Variables, Expressions, and Statements – A variable is simply a name for a number. An expression in C consists of other expressions optionally put together with operators. Examines the if, while, do-while, and the for statements.
• Building Blocks Revisited.
• Functions – put some of those building blocks in their own functions when they become too large, or when they do a different thing than the rest of the code.
• Variables, the Sequel – talks about variable scope and storage classes.
• Pointers – they are the address of data. Just like an int can be 12, a pointer can be the address of data.
• Structures – a construct that allows you to logically group variables into groups. You can then reference the group as a whole.
• Arrays – a linear collection of related data.
• Strings – a string in C is a sequence of bytes in memory that usually contains a bunch of letters.
• Dynamic Memory – explores the malloc(), free(), realloc(), and calloc() functions.
• More Stuff – topics include pointer arithmetic, typedef, enum, struct declarations, command line arguments, multidimensional arrays, casting and promotion, incomplete types, void pointers, NULL pointers, and static keywords.
• Standard I/O Library – used for reading from and writing to files.
• String Manipulation – find functions for pulling substrings out of strings, concatenating strings together, getting the length of a string, and more.
• Mathematics – functions that will serve your general purpose mathematical needs.

This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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12. Modern C by Jens Gustedt

Modern C seeks to motivate the reader to climb to higher levels of knowledge.

It is organized in chapters called “Levels” that summarize levels of familiarity with the C language and programming in general. Some features of the language are presented in parts on earlier levels, and elaborated in later one

The book is divided into five levels.

• First level – provides the reader with the very basics of C programs, their purpose, their structure, and how to use them.
• Second level – details most principal concepts and features such as control structures, data types, operators and functions. It aims to provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the things that are going on with running programs.
• Third level – goes to the heart of the C language. It fully explains pointers, familiarizes you with C’s memory model, and allows you to understand most of C’s library interface.
• Fourth level – goes into detail in specific topics, such as performance, reentrancy, atomicity, threads and type generic programming.
• Fifth level – discusses the author’s ideas for a future development of C.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” license.

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Next page: Page 5 – Beej’s Guide to Network Programming and more books

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – The C Book and more books
Page 2 – An Introduction to C & GUI Programming and more books
Page 3 – The GNU C Reference Manual and more books
Page 4 – Essential C and more books
Page 5 – Beej’s Guide to Network Programming and more books

All books in this series: