Customer Reviews

The C Answer Book

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book it answers, "The C Programming Language", is one that every C programmer probably owns and with good reason. This answer guide is a necessary complement to those of us who are curious about the authors' solutions.

Maybe you need the extra explanations; I know I did at times, if only to clarify or validate my thought processes. If you have a professor using "The C Progamming Language" as the primary textbook, you won't need this book. However, if you're going it alone, it's a good complement to self-study because it will engage you in some rational dialogue about the solution methodology.

That's the final star; if the book discussed rationale a bit more, it would merit the fifth star.

This book contains solutions to all the questions and exercises in the K&R C second edition. If you can figure everything out easily, then you don't need this book. If you want to cheat or need some help, get this book. I have it as a reference and to show my students.

Where was this book when I was struggling with the C language. In my opinion, this should not be a seperate book, but a part of the book, "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie.

At last students of C can work through the exercises in "The C Programming Language" and then turn to this book to make sure they are on the right track with the answers.

5 stars! Buy it today!

I did not know that this book existed. Now I do, and I heartily recommend it as a companion to the Kernigan and Ritchie "Bible" also known as "The C Programming Language."

The value in this book is not the answers themselves, but the explanations of why these are the answers. If you are having trouble grasping the finer points of pointers, this is the place to clear that up. Short, succinct, and focused.

This is a nice companion to the K&R book. Note that you can find online web sites that give solutions too, but sometimes they use libraries or concepts not yet covered by the K&R, whereas the answer book, for the most part stays at about the same gradient as the corresponding K&R page number. It also uses a fairly similar approach as the examples in K&R. Explanations are fairly short, but helpful. One thing it doesn't have (though the questions it answers don't really ask for it), is a working main function to test drive the solutions. In a way, this is a nice study to learn more about the topics but can be frustrating in the pointers section (see 'An aside' below).

I purchased this book used for around $7. I don't think I would purchase a new copy for a solutions book -- the condition was quite acceptable when it arrived even thought the seller described it as being in dismal condition. Got lucky I guess. That being said, if you're really serious about learning C, I would think this would be a worthwhile additional purchase to K&R. FWIW, C Programming All-in-one and C in a nutshell books have also been helpful to me.

An aside: As a newbie, I started using char *someParam = "a literal" and then I'd get an error when passing this as an arg to a (char *s) parameter if/when the function needed to 'manipulate' the string. I'm still not sure if I understand this correctly, but it seems that mutable strings need to be declared char [SOME_SIZE]someString = "a literal". Since arrays are pointers, this works as an arg to the (char *s) and the function will be able to manipulate the string. I mention this because the solutions would crash unless I did this!

This will prove invaluable to you if you use Kernighan and Ritchie's "C Programming Language" book. Obviously, the person below has bigger problems than this book: Hiddious? collage? It's very sad that this person is in "collage" and I really hope it's not true.

I took the C programming class from Dr. Tondo and I appreciate the clarity of his explanations which are included in this book. 5 stars sure! This book is a little gem...

It is absurd that the authors and/or publishers of this book have such little regard for its readers as to hold them hostage. They should make it explicitly clear that the solutions to the problems will cost another $.

C Answer Book, The (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software Series)

I'm disappointed on this product.
Since it is an answer book on a computer language book,
most of its content are listings. The problem with these
listings is that they are set with a font of a dot matrix printer.
The is no longer of our times, and a discrase for Prentice Hall.
Due to the bad font the listings read badly. Use a modern courier
font instead and things will be a lot more clear.