Peter van der Linden has stated in interviews (circa 2010) that he doesn’t receive royalties from used book sales anyway. However, the ethical path is to buy a used physical copy or check your local university library. Many universities have O’Reilly Safari subscriptions that include the digital version.
Let’s be clear: Most PDFs of this book circulating on GitHub are copyright infringements. Pearson Education (which now owns Sun Microsystems Press imprint) holds the rights. While authors often support free knowledge, uploading a full scanned PDF to a public GitHub repo violates GitHub’s DMCA policies. In fact, GitHub’s dmca repository is filled with takedown notices for this specific book.
Looking for a concise, professional text to describe or promote "Expert C Programming — Deep C Secrets" (PDF / GitHub)? Here’s a polished draft you can use for a README, project description, social post, or catalog entry.
Expert C Programming — Deep C Secrets is a focused collection of advanced C techniques, idioms, and practical patterns for experienced developers who want to write faster, safer, and more maintainable C code. The material covers low-level details, performance tuning, common pitfalls, and real-world examples, plus practical debugging and testing approaches used by systems programmers. expert c programming deep c secrets pdf github
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If you want, I can:
Old-style C (K&R) function declarations do not check arguments. He shows a terrifying example:
void foo(); /* No prototype */
foo(5, "hello", 3.14); /* Compiles fine, disaster at runtime */
With a proper prototype void foo(int x);, the compiler would scream.
Yes, but not reliably.
Even today, C++ and C programmers wince at complex declarations. Van der Linden provides the "Clockwise/Spiral Rule." For example, what is:
char *(*(*x())[])();
Without the book’s secrets, you would weep. With the book, you know it’s "function returning pointer to array of pointers to function returning pointer to char."