Effective C

Among non-fiction what stood out to me was David Bentley Hart's All Things are Full of Gods, great book also very fun to read written as a Platonic dialogue. To me one of the most compelling theologians today. Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting. Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them. The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books. Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.…

I agree on K&R and Expert C. I preferred Seacord’s Effective C to Modern C.

I would say "Effective C" is a good book (and Robert is awesome) but personally I feel like I learned the most by writing and disassembling small quines under different compilers and flags more than anything else. Also, reading through some codebases gave me good (and horrible) ideas and habits. However, C projects are usually messy and I am not sure whether recommending it would be helpful or just confusing. But I would say TenDRA, BearSSL, pkgconf, s6, kivaloo, apk-tools, libsodium, musl, OpenSSH and cosmopolitan libc are worth checking out. Finally increasing my tiny understanding of architectures, memory models and decades of safety issues was significantly helpful as well.

Agreed. It's also worth pointing out that Effective C is the most current in terms of being up to date with present-day C standards. K&R is so obsolete it's now wrong about some things. It's a pretty good read sometime down the road - when you can recognize its shortcomings - but it's not a book from which to start learning C.

King is good, also Seacord’s books: Effective C and Secure Coding .. Just ignore suggestions (parroting really) for K&R. It’s probably the worst introduction to C when it comes to good habits, undefined behavior and writing secure code, since it doesn’t even attempt to cover any of these but presents a total facade regarding what programming in C is like. K&R has created generations of people who call themselves C programmers but are essentially clueless when it comes to deep understanding of the language. Anyone that recommends K&R today is someone you want to avoid taking any advice on programming from.