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.
History Ĭ was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson's B. Because the book was co-authored by the original language designer, and because the first edition of the book served for many years as the de facto standard for the language, the book was regarded by many to be the authoritative reference on C.
The book was central to the development and popularization of C and is still widely read and used today. The C Programming Language (sometimes termed K&R, after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the C programming language, as well as co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined.
