Can Novices Jump Directly in C? (Books)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <431 at bria> uunet!bria!mike writes:
>The best companion is K&P's (as in "Pike") "Software Tools".

Undoubtedly there will be other corrections to this, but as proud owner
of autographed copies of these books I can tell you definitively that
"Software Tools" is by Kernighan and Plauger.  Kernighan and Pike's
book is "The UNIX Programming Environment".  I agree that they are
excellent, but they serve different audiences.  "Software Tools" was
published when access to C and UNIX was not widespread, in an attempt
to bring the power of the UNIX environment and toolkit philosophy to
the "rest of us".  It made Fortran tolerable by introducing the RatFor
language and a preprocessor that turned RatFor into ordinary Fortran.
A "Software Tools Users' Group" appeared on the scene and helped make
such tools widely available.  The need for RatFor these days is much
less, since C is widespread now, although the UNIX toolkit approach is
still not as prevalent as it deserves to be.  A later book by Kernighan
and Plauger, "Software Tools in Pascal", was essentially a rewrite of
the earlier "Software Tools" using Pascal instead of Ratfor (and of
course omitting the Ratfor preprocessor implementation chapter).  There
is no "Software Tools in C", which would be close to publishing some of
the UNIX source code, although I am sure such a book would be welcome.
"The UNIX Programming Environment" is targeted specifically at UNIX
application developers, with considerable emphasis on exploiting
existing tools.