note on c books

> Sorry for adding noise to this group,

I wouldn't worry about that.

The signal-to-noise ratio in this group is already abysmal, thanks to
the "topicality" zealots.

> however I am in need of an Advanced C book. There was a time I
> accidently stumbled on one on the web, it has five chapters with the
> last on writing web server. Could someone give me the pointer or link
> to it? And I won't mind other books.

I expect Richard Heath Field, who has a history of spamming this group
with advertisements for his book, will be along soon to recommend it.
I'd avoid it - it contains elementary mistakes, and has shown himself to
be too proud to accept error reports.

Really, it depends what you're after. Once you've learned the basics of
C, there are a whole lot of different directions you can pursue - with C
in your pocket, the world is your oyster.

By far and away the most important thing to learn if you're going to do
serious programming is some standard basic algorithms and data
structures.  Besides Knuth (which many people don't find easy to
read...), there is Corman, Rivest et al's book, which is exceptionally
clear and has quite a lot of stuff in it. It's all pseudocode, so it
would be an additional challenge to work out for yourself how to go
about implementing things in C: if you want to create a binary tree, how
should you deal with allocating the nodes? That sort of thing.

Another good book on algorithms but with more help on implementation
details is "Algorithms in C" by Sedgwick.

Alternatively, you may be interesting in using C to write a
sophisticated application that uses IPC or threading or networking or
the like. In that case, "Unix systems programming" by Robbins and
Robbins is a very good general introduction. For more hardcore
networking, there are some thick tomes by Stevens that are standard -
you mention writing a webserver, so that might be what you need.

Maybe you want to write GUI apps: in that case, you need to pick a
toolkit you like, which will probably be GTK if you're coding in C. I
don't know a good book to recommend, but there's excellent tutorial and
reference information accessible online from GTK's website.

Or you might be interested in applying C to lower-level programming at
the kernel level. "Understanding the Linux Kernel" by someone I can't
remember and "Essential Linux Device Drivers" by Venteswaran are both
readable.

--
Sincerely,

ZHOU Yuan <j0sf>