book cover

The C Programming Language, Second Edition

by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1988.
ISBN 0-13-110362-8 (paperback), 0-13-110370-9 (hardback).

The original web site is no longer accessible to me, and is seriously out of date.

Here is a list of errata in the published version; many of these are corrected in recent printings.

Dennis Ritchie died in early October, 2011. His web site at the time of his death is maintained by Bell Labs. That page includes most of the historical papers on C and its ancestors, along with material on Unix and other topics.

The book has been translated into many languages, including

Cover art ranges from familiar to eclectic:

Albanian cover Bulgarian cover Czech cover Chinese cover PRC cover Another PRC edition Newer Taiwan edition Danish cover Dutch cover Finnish cover French cover 2nd French cover German cover Greek cover Hebrew cover Hindi cover Hungarian cover (1st) Hungarian cover (2nd) Hungarian cover (2nd, new trans) Economy cover Italian cover New Italian cover Japanese cover Korean cover Polish cover new Polish cover Portuguese cover Romanian cover Russian cover Second Russian cover Another Russian cover 4th Russian cover 4th Russian cover (red) Serbo-croatian cover Slovak cover Slovenian cover Spanish cover Swedish cover more recent Swedish cover Turkish cover

Various editions for special purposes exist, for example the one with the second Chinese cover pictured above. This is published by Prentice-Hall and Tsinghua University, in a special version for mainland China; ISBN 7-302-02412-X. The cover and some front- and end-material are in Chinese; the text is a reproduction of the regular K&R 2. There are approved, low-cost editions in other countries, for example the orange-colored one pictured between the Hungarian and the Italian. There are also pirate editions, naturally not pictured.

There are also special printings for some US companies, for example Digital Equipment (now HP via Compaq), Convergent Technologies, and Texas Instruments. Often these turn up in searches at the online booksellers, but they won't be generally available, so don't try to order them.

If you find any translations not mentioned here, please let us know. Tracking down the elusive Hebrew and Finnish ones took a while; the Albanian is the most recent and the rarest, and we were instructed by learning that the rendition of "Hello world" in Albanian is "Përshëndetje të gjithëve."

The second edition is available on audio tape for loan or purchase from Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. There was also a Braille transcription of the first edition by the National Braille Press.

Tue Sep 18 19:49:18 EDT 2018