Peter Prinz - C in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference

by Peter Prinz and Tony Crawford

Copyright 2016 Peter Prinz and Tony Crawford. All rights reserved.

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This book is a complete reference to the C programming language andthe C runtime library. As an In a Nutshell book, its purpose is to serve as aconvenient, reliable companion for C programmers in their day-to-day work.It describes all the elements of the language and illustrates their usewith numerous examples.

The present description of the C language is based on the 2011 international C standard, ISO/IEC 9899:2011, widely known as C11. This standard supersedes the C99 standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999, and its Technical Corrigenda, TC1 of 2001, TC2 of 2004, and TC3 of 2007. The first international C standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1990, was published in 1990 and supplemented in 1995 by Normative Addendum 1 (ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995). The 1990 ISO/IEC standardcorresponds to the ANSI standard X3.159, which was ratified in late 1989and is commonly called ANSI C or C89.

The new features of the 2011 C standard are not yet fully supportedby all compilers and standard library implementations. In this book, wehave therefore labeled 2011 features such as multithreading, type-generic macros, and new standard libraryfunctions with the abbreviation C11. Extensions that were introduced by the C99 standard are labeled with theabbreviation C99.

This book is not an introduction to programming in C. Although itcovers the fundamentals of the language, it is not organized or written asa tutorial. If you are new to C, we assume that you have read at least oneof the many introductory books, or that you are familiar with a relatedlanguage, such as Java or C++.