Brian Kernighan's home page w/ his articles, books and source code

Brian Kernighan is still one of my favorite computer authors, even after many years.

He is of course very well-known to a lot of software people, but I'm writing this post because there will still be people (particularly people new or recent to software) who don't know about him and his work, and also because of the useful links to his books, below (some of them with downloadable source code).

He is the co-author of the classic books "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (well-known as just "K&R") and "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike. I read both of those books years ago near the beginning of my programming career, and even today I find there are very few books of that caliber - concise yet dense with information, clear writing, etc.

He was one of the early people to work on UNIX and C at Bell Labs, and had made a lot of contributions to many areas.

The AWK programming language is named partly after him - the K is for Kernighan (*).

Brian Kernighan's home page at Princeton University. He is currently a professor there after working at Bell Labs for many years.

Wikipedia page on Brian Kernighan.

Brian Kernighan page at Bell Labs.

(*) And D is for Digital :), the name of a new introductory book on computers (hardware, software and communications) by Kernighan. I just saw it. It looks like a good present for the non-technical person(s) in your life.

There are some interesting articles at Kernighan's pages at Princeton University and Bell Labs (two of the links above).

Also, the pages about his books have links to downloadable source code for some of the programs in those books. See the links below:

The Practice of Programming.

The C Programming Language.

The Unix Programming Environment.

The AWK Programming Language.

Inspired by nature.
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