the book is structured in a way that makes it pretty easy to jump around and pick and choose which parts you want to read or skip, so it's not a very large commitment to read it
Failure of malloc() might be a bad example to pick because on linux, by default, most distros overcommit, so malloc won't fail, generally. Instead, malloc will succeed allocating the address space just fine, but the RAM will get allocated upon first use, meaning that even though malloc gave you a supposedly valid pointer rather than NULL, actually using that pointer will crash your program.