The C Programming Language 2nd Edition - Solutions

Introduction

The C Programming Language is a very popular book and sometimes people refer to it as K&R. The authors Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie did a very good job of explaining the core concepts of programming. The focus of the book is the C programming language, however, the approach is general, so it can be extrapolated to other programming languages.

Each chapter of the book contains exercises that could be very helpful for a better understanding of the C language. The exercises are designed so that anybody can solve them with the knowledge acquired up to that exercise.

This repository contains the solutions to the exercises from each chapter of the book. These solutions are meant to be helpful for those who want to learn to program with the C language.

Environment

The source code is not tied up to an IDE, so any text editor will do the job. However, there are useful tasks and settings available for Visual Studio Code. For a better experience using this editor, the C/C++ extension provides some very helpful features specific to the C programming language.

Compilers

To be able to write programs in C, a compiler is required. There are many options available for each operating system.

macOS

The Clang compiler is a very nice choice when using macOS. It is available with Xcode Command Line Tools, which can be easily installed using the following command:

xcode-select --install

Linux

The GCC compiler is a very popular way to build C programs and it is a good choice when using Linux. Each distro has its own set of development tools that comes with the GCC compiler out of the box. The development tools can be installed with the following commands:

Ubuntu / Debian / Debian derivatives

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -Sy base-devel

Fedora

sudo yum update
sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Legacy Software Development"

Windows

Because Windows is not a Unix like operating system, Windows Subsystem for Linux (a.k.a. WSL) could be a very good approach when writing C programs. It provides a full Linux system that can make the programming experience much better. The official documentation has a pretty good explanation about how to install WSL.

MinGW Compiler Collection is another good alternative to obtain access to the GCC compiler on a Windows system. The official documentation shows how it can be installed step by step.

Debuggers

A debugger is a tool that can become very handy when trying to find out how a program works or why it doesn't. There are many times when the code will compile successfully because syntactically there are no problems. However, that doesn't mean there aren't logical problems. If that is the case it might be a very good idea to use a debugger.

A very good option is LLDB. It is the default debugger in Xcode on macOS and supports debugging C, Objective-C and C++. It converts debug information into Clang types so that it can leverage the Clang compiler infrastructure.

Another very popular option is GDB. It supports the following languages (in alphabetical order): Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust.