Answers with commentary/discussion for selected problems from The C Puzzle Book, 2nd ed. by Alan R. Feuer (buy at Amazon).

(Do not confuse this with The C Answer Book--also a worthy tome, but completely different.)

The number of programming books that have stayed in print, mostly unchanged, for 20 years, is pretty small. The C Puzzle Book is an excellent resource for anyone looking for help learning the arcane corners of C. I had intensive instruction in C programming in college, and used the language for several years professionally writing device drivers, but I was still surprised, working through the problems in this book, by how many intricacies there are to the language that I did not understand clearly. Interestingly, many of these details are covered in the specification of the language--i.e., it's not like they are undefined behavior because the language has no formal specification other than its implementation (some widely used languages fall into the latter category, unfortunately for their heavy users--Ruby comes to mind). Rather, these details are specified, but poorly understood because they do not come up every day. Even with a small language it is not easy to keep all the rules in mind all the time.

The C Puzzle Book includes answers for the exercises, but the explanations are sometimes terse or give you the why but not the how. In this repository, as an ongoing project, I'm trying to write down notes on the problems that I found more interesting or surprising, with my own more detailed commentary than the original book. For most of the problems that I thought were worth commentary, I've also saved you the trouble of typing in the code--I had to type it in and run it myself in order to understand it!

Pull requests will be gratefully considered! Help me make this another good source of online C info.

All files in this repository with names of the form [NUMBER]-code.c are copyright 1999 Alan R. Feuer.

The preceding paragraph constitutes my acknowledgement in good faith of the copyright terms applicable to the material here duplicated from the book The C Puzzle Book. I believe that my act of reproducing these C language source files falls under the doctrine of fair use, specifically the provision for works of commentary or criticism. If I am incorrect, please send email to [email protected]; I will gladly remove these files from public availability if notified by a person with legal authority to make such requests.

All other material in this GitHub repositary is copyright Alex Chamberlain under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See the file LICENSE.