[jfarmer]

I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but my personal experience was the opposite. C was the first programming I learned and I learned it by reading K&R in high school. I certainly didn't know anything about assembly, compilers, or another high-level language.

From there I learned by contributing to open source projects.

Not saying K&R is the best way, but it's not so opaque that a beginner with zero knowledge of C (or even programming) can't pick it up and learn if they're motivated to learn it.

[SwellJoe]

K&R was the only C book that ever allowed me to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding C and understand it. I'd tried at least a half dozen other books and was either bored out of my mind at the painfully slow pace, or utterly baffled around chapter 2 or 3 where it leapt into pointers and seemed to just assume it was obvious.

For whatever reason K&R was a perfect storm of comprehension for me, and I came away actually knowing how to read and even sort of write C (and knowing how to search the Internet, pre-Google, or ask reasonably smart questions on the mailing list or IRC channel of the software I was working with, for answers to the harder questions). I failed miserably with every other book on the subject.