About programing, a general question

[James McKenzie]

On 12/21/10 1:46 PM, Parshwa Murdia wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:46 PM, William Case <billlinux at rogers.com 
> <mailto:billlinux at rogers.com>> wrote:
>
>     I am not a programmer, but I wanted the answer you seem to want.  How
>     does the damn thing work?  More explicitly:
>
>     How does human understandable information get converted by a machine
>     into electrical data; then store it; may or may not, transform,
>     compare,
>     and/or relocate the data; and then re-present the data as information
>     meaningful to humans?
>
>     I found the answer in "The C Programming Language" by Brian W.
>     Kernighan
>     and Dennis M. Ritchie.  This book is such a basic that it is often
>     referred to just as K&R.  If you try to simply use this book as a
>     tutorial for the C language it is too difficult.  Almost every
>     sentence
>     contains a new concept.  But K&R and 'C' are closest to the metal.
>      It's
>     description and particularly its appendices are used by programmers
>     mainly as a reference.  It really is a text on how to best write
>     code so
>     that the compiler can use your 'C' code by translating it into machine
>     language. It is also, therefore, basic instructions for compiler
>     writers
>     on how they have writer their compilers.
>
>
>
> Sure, how to get this book? Is it available online somewhere?
Not legally, anywhere.  However, the Second Edition is available from 
Amazon and other book retailers.  It is not very expensive.  It would 
cost me more to mail you the extra copy I have to you than it would be 
to buy it (even in the United States.)

James McKenzie