The expert gets entertainment and probably some new ideas as well. The book begins with general advice about programming, data objects and so on which is valuable whatever the language. Part III is the set of rules on expressions, statements, functions, parameters, arrays, pointers and the pre- processor. Part IV includes an overview of the Standard C Library, which is a handy quick reference though obviously it cannot be comprehensive. The book ends with a collection of C idioms, which are clever techniques for doing things that are both difficult and fairly common such as stack push and pop, command line parsing, queues, linked lists and the like.
Most chapters have exercises at the end and the answers are provided in an appendix.
I agree with almost all of their rules and where I don't agree I can see that they have a point. I learned a lot from them, particularly about designing effective testing and debugging methods. They can save a lot of time compared with just sticking in fprintf statements in the hope of finding out what is going on. Last Update - 11 September 2001. All rights reserved.