C track: introduction

This is the home page for the C track of CS 11. This information is for the Winter 2012 term.

Administrative information

Go to this page for all the administrative information pertaining to this track.

Current grades for each student are accessible from csman.

The C style guide. This tells you how I want you to format your C code.
An introduction to the make program and Makefiles, which are extremely useful for multi-file projects.
A brief introduction to the gdb debugger.
A discussion on how to handle command-line arguments in your C programs.

Peter A. Darnell, Philip E. Margolis, C: A Software Engineering Approach, 2nd Ed.

This is a comprehensive introduction to the C language which is quite readable. It will be the main reference for the course.
Kernighan and Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed.

This book, known familiarly as "K&R", is a concise complete, and fairly readable description of the C language. This will be the reference textbook for the track. It's not easy reading for people with no programming experience, but the entire C language is described in it, so if you want to know about some fine point, this is the place to go.
Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets

This book, despite having lots of pretty glaring typos, is one of the few books that explains what is going on at the machine level during compilation and execution of a C program. It has much more information than beginners require, but more advanced programmers should read it.
The development of the C language

The interesting history of how C came to be, by Dennis Ritchie, one of the authors of K&R.