That popularity means a great many books have been written on how to write C. So you might - quite reasonably - ask if the world really needs another one. The answer: "probably not."

But this isn't another book on how to write C - it's a book on how not to write C. And that's something the world desperately does need, because despite its enduring popularity, many programmers remain blissfully unaware of the issues C has or how to avoid them.

This book assumes you can already write C the way all those other books tell you to do it. Its purpose is not to repeat what you already know, but to reveal some of the nuances, curiosities and outright absurdities of the language that are all too often ignored.

You won't find any of that emphasised in "The C Programming Language" by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. Some other books do make a point of highlighting those issues, but not many were written for the embedded programmer. When you write embedded software, there's rarely a safety net to help catch your mistakes - and those mistakes can be mean disaster. If you're in any doubt about that, look up Therac 25 or Arianne flight V88.

The embedded programmer must do everything possible to avoid bugs - and when you work with C, it might just feel like the language is working against you!

That's why this book is different and why every embedded programmer should have a copy.