“The C Programming Language,” written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and published by Prentice Hall, gave C its first broadly available reference and tutorial. Kernighan’s own page about the book documents it as a Prentice Hall title and tracks its editions, translations, and errata, a firsthand record kept by one of its two authors.
Ritchie’s history of the language, “The Development of the C Language,” names the book as the description that most programmers used to learn C. Because the language predated any formal standard, this book effectively defined C in practice for years; the version of the language it described is still commonly called “K&R C.”
The book’s influence came as much from its style as its content. Its short, example-led chapters and its famous first program that prints a simple greeting became a template for how programming languages are taught. A later second edition was revised to match the ANSI C standard, but the original made C accessible far beyond the walls of Bell Labs.