Brian Kernighan

"C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess."

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."

"Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought."

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."

"Associative arrays are very very useful things and if you are only going to have one data structure thats the one to have. Because you could build everything else with it if you want."

"Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you wont do it well anyway."

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if youre as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"