The Standard C Library

by P.J. Plauger

Prentice Hall's most important C programming title in years. A companion volume to Kernighan & Ritchie's C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. A collection of reusable functions (code for building data structures, code for performing math functions and scientific calculations, etc.) which will save C programmers time and money especially when working on large programming projects. The C Library is part of the ANSI (American National Standard Institute) for the C Language. This new book contains the complete code for the library. It covers elements of the library with which even the most experienced C programmers are not familiar such as internationalization (the ability to write programs that can adapt to different cultural locales, for example, using the C library, programmers can write software that manipulates large character sets such as Kanji). Structured like the Standard C Library, it contains 15 headers declaring or defining all of the names in the library. A separate chapter covers each header, including excerpts from relevant portions of the C Standard showing all codes needed to implement each portion of the library and explaining why it is necessary. The book teaches readers the concepts and design issues associated with library building. Using this book, programemrs will be less likely to re-code something that already exists in a given program. Plauger is one of the world's leading experts on C and the C Library.

Genres: Programming, Computers, Computer Science, Technical, Reference, Software

512 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1991

About the author

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._Pl...

Phillip James Plauger is an author and entrepreneur. He has written and co-written articles and books about programming style, software tools, the C programming language, and science fiction short stories.

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers of comp.lang.c will be familiar with Plauger, a ubiquitous face on various ANSI/ISO standardization committees. He's put together a detailed tour of the C standard library, useful to users thereof but especially implementors. Thorough coverage of stdio is appreciated, while rather cursory treatment of the math elements is regrettable -- then again, very few people, I'm-serious-to-God-here, *very* few people -- ought be writing mathematical core code, especially in this age of appalling mathematical illiteracy among programmers. Unfortunately, ISO C99 is not (in the most recent edition I know of) covered: C90 is the basis of discussion (no such book, to the best of my knowledge, addresses C99, but the groin-grabbingly sweet C Interfaces and Implementations uses it throughout).

The printing is disgustingly ugly, to boot.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the C "BIBLE" (K&R book), this is the next best book to get if you find yourself doing C programming. Though C may be a bit out of date these days, if you find yourself in its boundary for anything, then this book is an excellent resource.

Why would C be used still? Probably most likely on low memory embedded systems. This book explains and gives implementation for the entire standard C library. So if you can't afford to package the whole standard C library in your embedded system, you can use this book's implementations to help you code your own versions of the functions you need.

This book was a big time saver when I was working with embedded systems programming.

[James Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of a better way to get more acquainted with the C standard library and all of its quirks and pitfalls than by reading this book. It's basically an annotated implementation, and spends a lot of time discussing the C standard and why things are the way they are.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Buy a copy of Hacker's Delight if you are implementing a C runtime library.