C IS AN AWFUL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, and an awfully popular, powerful and pervasive programming language. Everyone who has used C will know it blooms with subtleties and traps for the novice or unwary expert. Yet it remains the language of choice for systems and application programming, both for historical reasons (such as Unix) and because of its perceived power and convenience.

When people first learn C, they are usually warned away from its more glaring pitfalls by teachers or texts. A very early lesson usually highlights the differences between the "=" and "==" operators, for instance. On the other hand, it usually isn't necessary for novices to understand the differences between "char *a[];" and "char (*a)[];". This book focuses on those intricacies of the language which expert C programmers -- and people wishing to become such -- need to understand in detail.

Van der Linden clarifies many often-misunderstood issues. There are chapters discussing the history of C; systematic approaches to reading and understanding complicated declarations; practically all of the similarities and differences between arrays and pointers; issues related to linking and runtime data structures; the Intel 80x86 architecture; and an introduction to C++ from the point of view of a C expert. This is all delivered in a light-hearted but unpatronising style, accompanied by asides about famous and infamous bugs, a "light relief" section at the end of each chapter, and an appendix on "secrets of programmer job interviews".