Reccomended Reading#
Here are and good books that I reccomend to people. There aren’t very many, but these are books that I think are good. All reccomendations are in English.
NOTE: This list is in a perpetual in progress state.
If you need to save money on textbooks#
I’ve recently found a service that tries to find the lowest prices on textbooks. It may be useful for a budget conscious student, or someone who just needs a textbook for a particular subject.
PAY ATTENTION, Some of these prices are for rentals, and not purchases.
Many of my reccomendations will link to this service. Try Direct Textbook
Free Resources#
“Programming Notes for Professionals”#
GoalKicker provides a series of free books for learning all sorts of technical
subjects including programming languages, programming tools, operating systems
and database software. No information required, just select a book and download
it free of charge!
Click Here to obtain these books.
C Programming Language#
“C Programming for Dummies 2nd Edition” - Dan Gookin#
A cheap, modern book, part of the legendary “For Dummies” series. This gets you
up to speed with the relatively modern C17 standard. It’s the book I learned C
from, and it gets really in depth, not only teaching you the basics of C, but
how to effectively use the whole language. And if you don’t know where to start,
it even teaches you how to set up a development environment.
Purchase this book
“The C Programming Language Second Edition” - Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie#
This book is often described as the “C” Bible, this book teaches the reader how to program in the C89/C90 standard, so it’s slightly long in the tooth. But it’s still relevant enough today to provide a functional basis for writing in C. A bit overpriced these days from some sources, owning a copy seems to have become some kind of social signal among some.
“Modern C” - Jens Gustedt#
Great for getting up to speed with the latest changes in C, but it doesn’t seem to be beginner friendly. If you already know how to write programs and perhaps a basic grasp of C or C++, you might be able to grok this.
Read for free Purchase this book
Game Programming#
“Game Programming Patterns” by Robert “Bob” Nystrom#
A book on various game programming design patterns that can help make your engine
or game code cleaner and more maintainable. Paperback copies are a decent price
if you want a physical copy. Or available as an eBook if you prefer. There’s
also a free HTML version provided on the author’s site.
Read for free
Purchase this book
Avoid#
Anything written by AI#
AI is prone to spewing misinformation and the people who sell them often don’t appear to double check what’s been written. This you could be wasting money that teaches blatant falsehoods, omits information information, or something that ends up making no sense at all. If the people churning out these books were willing to correct the AI, they’d probably be just as willing to write the book themselves. The effects of such errors can be anything in the range of benign to life threatening, and AI cannot tell the difference!
Furthermore, the sources that the AI model uses likely infringe on others’ copyrights since they have to scrape data to learn how to generate new data. All of these arguments apply to AI books in general, but it’s a hundred times more important to know that any informational book that you get is at least made and reviewed by an actual human with real intelligence.
Books that use AI for their cover art only are a different story, since in that case the actual content is human created.
“The C Programming Language First Edition” - Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie#
This book was good for it’s time, but it’s based on a version of C that existed prior to it’s ANSI/ISO standardization around 1989/90. This means that some of the code may not be accepted by modern compilers. The Second Edition is at least compliant with the C89/C90 standard, so you should read that instead.
It might be good if you need to learn pre-standard C specifically for some ancient legacy system.