Even experienced C programmers can get themselves into trouble if they're not certain of what they're doing. Each of the book's many examples has trapped a professional programmer.

C Traps and Pitfalls aims to encourage defensive programming by showing how other people, even experienced professionals, have gotten themselves into trouble. These mistakes are generally easy to avoid once seen and understood, so the emphasis is on specific examples rather than generalities.

Covers lexical, syntactic, and semantic pitfalls, linking and library problems, preprocessor, and portability pitfalls.