When comparing The Mythical Man-Month vs The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R), the Slant community recommends The Mythical Man-Month for most people. In the question“What are the most influential books every programmer should read?” The Mythical Man-Month is ranked 5th while The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose The Mythical Man-Month is:
(That you can't just add people to move faster.)
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Teaches you something counter-intuitive
(That you can't just add people to move faster.)
Pro Shows the value of focus and communication
Pro Well known classic
This book is so well known that it's affectionately called "K & R", after the authors.
It's been cited in many other books and is familiar to most, if not all, CS students.
Pro It's excerpted from the idea of its creators
This book is written by Dennis Ritchie, who was one of the main people behind the development and design of C and UNIX.
Pro Creative, challenging exercises
The challenges at the end of each chapter do a great job of requiring many of the skills learned up to that point. Completing the challenges is a great way of insuring you understand the material.
Pro This book set the template for programming language books
Cons
Con It's showing its age in the proposed solutions and methods
Software development community gathered enough knowledge to have a lot more productive methods.
Con Out of Date
Some commands and practices are out of date, so errata and googling is needed while going through the book.
Con Teaches bad style
The K&R style works for old Unix mainframe command-line programs that exit after a simple task and leave the cleanup to the OS; where input is only from trusted experts; and most functions are only called internally to the program. The environment is very different today. This style will get your server owned by hackers, or crash it due to a memory leak, etc. You will have to unlearn what you've learned from this book to use C correctly in the real world today.
Con Not for beginners
Assumes familiarity not only with programming concepts but some C language specifics.