Brian Wilson Kernighan was a member of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the same group that produced Unix and C. He is best known as the “K” in “K&R,” the book “The C Programming Language” that he wrote with Dennis Ritchie. His own page about the book records it as a Prentice Hall title, lists its many translated editions, and maintains the known errata, firsthand evidence of his role as its author.
Ritchie’s history of C confirms the partnership from the other side: in “The Development of the C Language,” Ritchie writes that the reference description most programmers relied on was the book he produced together with Kernighan. The book grew out of Kernighan’s earlier tutorial writing on C, and its plain, example-driven style set the tone for how the language was taught for decades.
Beyond the C book, Kernighan worked on a series of small Unix tools and languages and was a frequent author of documentation and tutorials for the system. His writing turned the habits of the Unix research group, small programs combined to do larger jobs, into lessons that programmers outside Bell Labs could follow.
After his years at Bell Labs, Kernighan became a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton, continuing to teach and write about programming. His clear explanations of C and Unix remain among the most widely read introductions to either subject.