Jamsa's 1001 C/C++ Tips by Kris Jamsa packs 1,001 tidbits for C programmers of all levels into one package, roughly 3 tips per 2 pages. The tips are generally pretty meager fare one by one, and many are a complete waste of space, but useful facts are common enough to make the book worthwhile.
December 8, 1997
The early part of the book contains most of the wasted tips, with factoids such as "how to add statements to your program" (type them on a line) and "displaying output on a new line" (use /n), aimed at total beginners. My problem with this is that the tips for beginners are far too random to actually teach someone the language, and far too basic to be of use to anyone with a brief knowledge of it.
Once Jamsa gets past the kiddie stuff the tips start becoming useful. The tips range from guidelines to good programming, such as formatting and commenting, to details on how certain standard C operations work which even intermediate programmers might not have known, to details on how to perform certain functions, generally with a PC slant, such as using ANSI codes and dealing with the keyboard buffer.
The tips are divided into sections which include language features such as strings, functions, arrays and pointers, and a solid look at macros and constants. Other sections cover useful detail on "guts" programming - how to use the guts of the PC system to your advantage, such as DOS interrupts, the system stack, and memory management.
The book is meant for browsing rather than reading straight through - none of the tips are written as if you had already read earlier tips, although they contain pointers to tips with explanations of underlying concepts. While most programmers will already know many of the tips, few will be unable to find something new and useful in there.
