“The C Programming Language,” written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and published by Prentice-Hall in 1978, was the first widely available book on the C language. Ritchie had designed and implemented C at Bell Labs, so the book carried the authority of the language’s creator.
For several years before any formal standard existed, this book served as the de facto definition of C. The dialect it described came to be known as “K&R C,” after the authors’ initials, and that name is still used to distinguish the pre-standard language from the later ANSI C of 1989.
The book is also famous for its very first example program, which prints “hello, world.” That tiny program became the traditional first thing programmers write when learning almost any new language, a convention that spread directly from this text.
Compact, precise, and widely imitated in style, the book is one of the most influential programming texts ever written. Its first edition is preserved in the Internet Archive as a scanned original.