[csl]

I also did a scan of the book; it seems pretty good!

However, if you're serious about learning C then I strongly recommend getting the K&R book [0]. It's short and quickly gets down to business --- the first chapter alone gives you a condensed but working overview of the language as a whole.

Even experienced C programmers seem to keep the book around as it's good as a reference as well.

I strongly recommend people to learn C. It's a small, beautiful and very powerful language and the lingua franca for language ABIs. In fact, many popular dynamic languages are implemented in C (Python, Ruby, Lua and countless others).

Your time will be well spent!

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

[HillRat]

Or King's C Programming: A Modern Approach, which lacks the conciseness (and affordability) of K&R but is probably the best single text out there, and unlike K&R is updated through C99.

[krick]

In fact, this one (implementing Lispy thing, I mean) seems the best to me so far. Why? Paradoxically, because it's so obviously incomplete, so it makes you search something by yourself while you read it and helps to actually understand a little bit more.

Both K&R and "Modern Approach" lack that word "Modern" very much, yet are written with undertone "it's everything you have to know about C", when it isn't. Person who doesn't know C very likely doesn't know how OS works, what architecture layers are behind the software he uses every day. He just knows somehow he wants to learn C, but doesn't really understand what C is, yet he knows that virtually everything is written in C, and "everything" usually doesn't run in terminal, but processes and produces sound, images, video, can have GUI, use some external devices, run in parallel, run on GPU. Also, it's pretty obvious (especially if you've used some language like Python already) that nobody writes everything from scratch these days, but there're many libraries that proved to be useful.

And stuff like branching and cycles seems to be pretty obvious even for somebody without coding experience, as far as I can judge from what I've seen so far. Yet we have plenty books that spends 20 pages to explain "if" keyword and mentions every function in standard library (why?! it's 2014, people, we have cplusplus.com now!)and covers nothing in sense of what useful libraries are out there, what are these domains where you still should use C today (because feet to meter converter shouldn't be written in C today and you probably should choose Python if there's no specific reason to use C), what tools to use for testing and debugging and such.

And while it can be justified for K&R (jeez, how old is that book!) it's just ridiculous that book that has "Modern" (well, it was 2008, but still…) in it's title covers almost nothing of what person who wants to program in C should know today. Worse, you'll see that only after reading these 800+ pages.

"C the Hard Way" is a little bit better, but still not as good as this one. This one also isn't perfect, but is the best of what I've seen so far.

[kjs3]

Kim King wrote my Modula-2 textbook. If this is as good as that, it's probably something worth picking up.