This book covers, in as succinct a manner as possible, the whole definition of the C language. It is intended to be readable, yet terse and unambiguous; short yet comprehensive. The first chapter conducts the reader on a tour of C; at the end of the chapter; the reader has addressed most important aspects of the language and should be in a position to write non-trivial C programmes. Subsequent chapters treat the topics raised in the first in detail and present a number of tested illustrative examples. At the end of each chapter a number of small programmes and code fragments are given which contain deliberately inserted syntactic and semantic errors. The reader is invited to find the errors, which are pointed out elsewhere in the text. Experienced programmers of high-level languages may be able to read quickly over the first five chapters, which treat areas of C that are not fundamentally different to such languages. The remaining chapters should be read with care; in its treatment of pointers, especially, C is unique. This book only treats the common subset of C as defined by the ANSI standard. It is generic and applies to all environments using the standard. It does not deal with graphics or other libraries specific to particular computing environments or with implementation-dependent extensions to the C language. The book should be useful as an introductory text for novice programmers and as an accessible reference for experienced software developers.