Preface

This book is a complete reference to the C programming language and the C runtime library. As a Nutshell book, its purpose is to serve as a convenient, reliable companion for C programmers in their day-to-day work. It describes all the elements of the language and illustrates their use with numerous examples.

The present description of the C language is based on the 1999 international C standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999, including the Technical Corrigenda, TC1 of 2001 and TC2 of 2004. This standard, widely known as C99, is an extension of the ISO/IEC 9899:1990 standard and the 1995 Normative Addendum 1 (ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995). The 1990 ISO/IEC standard corresponds to the ANSI standard X3.159, which was ratified in late 1989 and is commonly called ANSI C or C89.

The new features of the 1999 C standard are not yet fully supported by all compilers and standard library implementations. In this book we have therefore labeled 1999 extensions, such as new standard library functions that were not mentioned in earlier standards, with the abbreviation C99.

This book is not an introduction to programming in C. Although it covers the fundamentals of the language, it is not organized or written as a tutorial. If you are new to C, we assume that you have read at least one of the many introductory books, or that you are familiar with a related language, such as Java or C++.