Dennis Ritchie was an American computer scientist who created the C programming language and the Unix operating system. He also was one of the authors (the ‘R’) of the famous in K&R C book. The first edition of this book was published in 1978 and it was the first widely available book on the C programming language. It is one of the first books I read about programming and I still think it is one of the best.

While some people enjoy reading a book like K&R C to learn a new language (and I certainly did back in the days), I now think reading text books about new programming languages is not the most effective way of learning a new language. Although it may still be the most effective way for learning your first language, because everything is new and you need a thorough understanding of the concepts, I think there may be more effective ways for learning your second, third or fourth programming language.

It was when the world wide web became a commodity that programming books lost there use as a reference, even for code examples. This changed the nature of programming books. I notice most programmers today do not (know how to) implement from documentation. They use implementation examples that they copy/paste from code they find using Google and Koders.

Another concept in programming books is taking advantage of prior knowledge. I remember it was a delight to learn C++ from a book titled “from C to C++”. The author assumed the reader knew everything about C and only discussed the differences, therefor not wasting the readers precious time.

This idea is also the basis for a (relatively) new phenomenon: interactive web applications that behave as language tutors. It learns you programming by example and it allows you to progress at your own speed. Learning by example skips a lot of the theory and this is why I don’t know how well it will work for real beginners, but for programmers that already know a few languages it is a fun and fast way to learn. I made a list of good (free) interactive language tutorials online:

1. Javascript: Codecademy Javascript
2. Regular Expression: RegexOne
3. SQL: SQLzoo
4. Ruby: Try Ruby
5. Python: Try Python (Runs on Linux using Moonlight 2)
6. Haskell: Try Haskell
7. Scala: Simply Scala
8. CSS: CSS 101

Even though you should try all of the above, there may be one “traditional” text-book that you should read. It is the free and very well written book Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke.