The C "boot camp" is called K&R (plus a plain Linux development environment). Plenty of devs have gotten started with just that, and in around the same time.
The problem with K&R is that is useless for building actual, working C applications. Even being up to date with the language's specs means very little as getting every different library up and running in each platform is a fairly high barrier, much more so than other platforms.
The companion Kernighan and Pike is very good on building full Unix command line utilities. But yes, the platform learning process of getting to hello world can be remarkably hard.