Book excerpts:

The aim of this book is to teach GNU users how to write software in C. It is written primarily as a tutorial for beginners but should be thorough enough to be used as a reference by experience programmers. The basics are layed down in full in the first few chapters, beginners will read these chapters carefully while those with prior experience can skim through them. All the information is there, no prior knowledge of programming is assumed.

The contents of this book can be divided into two topics: the core C language, and the standard functionality made available to the programmer. The standard functionality is provided by GNU Libc, this is a library of C functionality that is part of every GNU system. Neither of these topics is of much use without the other but there is a focus on the core langauge near the beginning and more discussion on Libc near the end. The ordering of topics is designed to teach C programming in an incremental fashion where each chapter builds on the previous one. Some aspects of the core langauge are only really of use to experienced programmers and so appear near the end.