However, no new edition of The C Programming Language has been issued to cover the more recent standards.īyte magazine stated in August 1983, " is the definitive work on the C language.
In 2012, an eBook version of the second edition was published in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats.ĪNSI C, first standardized in 1989 (as ANSI X3.159-1989), has since undergone several revisions, the most recent of which is ISO/IEC 9899:2018 (also termed C17 or C18), adopted as an ANSI standard in June 2018. The second edition of the book (and as of 2021, the most recent) has since been translated into over 20 languages. In April 1988, the second edition of the book was published, updated to cover the changes to the language resulting from the then-new ANSI C standard, particularly with the inclusion of reference material on standard libraries. Its version of C is sometimes termed K&R C (after the book's authors), often to distinguish this early version from the later version of C standardized as ANSI C. The first edition, published February 22, 1978, was the first widely available book on the C programming language.
Kernighan would write most of the book's "expository" material, and Ritchie's reference manual became its appendices. Īnother Bell Labs employee, Brian Kernighan, had written the first C tutorial, Īnd he persuaded Ritchie to coauthor a book on the language. C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson's B.