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Summary: Be careful of these reviews...
Review: Looks like someone who doesn't know there's a difference between "Practical C" and "Practical C++" has managed to mix up which reviews go on which page, and has even repeated the same review on BOTH pages. Chances are that most reviewers were not confusing the languages: just someone at Amazon.
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Summary: O'Reilly has outdone themselves once again!
Review: Once again, O'Reilly has outdone themselves. I was recentlly assigned a project where some CGI programming was done with C and I needed to come up to speed on C fairly quickly. As usual, I sought O'Reilly. While having programming experience in other languages, the book has done a great job of bringing me up to speed on the intricacies of C and how to effectively use the language. I would recommend this book to anyone who has some programming experience and is looking to learn somehting new.
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Summary: Fustrated by lack of solutions to exercises
Review: Overall this book covers all the corners of C. What fustrated me most that none of the exercises in the book had solutions. You know how when you are learning something new it's nice to go peek, and see if you are on the right track. Well with this book I guess the author feels you should figure it out on your own. I've not got the time, I've got to learn it fast, trial and error are a waste of my time. 90% of the time you are taking your coding approach from something aready written anyway.
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Summary: O'Reilly - A way of life...
Review: Reading other people's reviews for most of the O'Reilly series books, what most people are forgetting is that O'Reilly books are not for the faint hearted. These books are written by people who use these languages for a living. They teach people in the more advanced capabilities of the language and the proper ways to use it. In fact, several of the books are written by people who were developing the languages. Practical C Programming and all other books in the Nutshell series are for technicly enclined people, not for beginners to the area. These books have been ranked as the best of the best for a reason, their real. Any book that tells you your going to learn a language in 21 days is not going to teach you any details and turn you into a code copier, not a code programmer. But then again, that's MHO.
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Summary: C in a nutshell....
Review: Simply put. I've tried about 3 books on C prior to reading this one. I picked it up at the library. Good enough for me to buy my own copy! Get this book if you really want to learn C.
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Summary: Fairly well-written introduction to beginners
Review: Steve Oualline's Practical C Programming 3rd Edition, whether or not it provide the fairly well-written introduction to programming with C, certainly deserves up to three stars. The book starts from the discussion of good programming style. His suggestions on styles might be a subject to debate, however, are worth to listen as a one-time-reference for beginners who want to obtain readability to their source code. On the one hand, this book will give you the advantage of ease of reading through entire pages of the book, and, on the other hand, you will be able to avoid cumbersome work to search for well-written tutorials on the web consuming your precious time. Although the book is not the best, I emphasize this book is a fairly well-written one-time-reference. If you need more preciseness describing C programming language, this book is not the choice. If you are a very beginner who want to look at *loosely* overview of how to program in console mode with C programming language, this book is your choice.
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Summary: excellent real-world instruction
Review: The author does an excellent job of introducing students to practical habits that will assist them in writing applications for the real world. His humorous approach keeps the book interesting, and he uses illustrations generously to explain the concepts being presented. He begins this excellent book by emphasizing the need for good documentation in programs, a feature that is missing in most other textbooks on the language. His approach helps to build good coding habits and style, not just syntax and mechanics of the language. This is an excellent addition to any C programmer's bookshelf, whether they are beginning to code with the language or have several years of experience with C.
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Summary: Very good, not perfect
Review: The author has many good points about style, many valid. Except that I find his over use of comments unessicary, especially when commenting declarations of variables. Simply unneeded (most of the time) If you name variables correctly. While I definitely do not subscribe to the idea that hard code to write should be hard code to read. Some basic literacy, in common variable names such as I or j for integer counters. I am about ½ way though the book, I particularly liked chapter 7 (Programming process). My only other criticism of this good book, is it doesn't prepare the reader much to some of the common bad conventions and bad habits some people have, and likely will see. The book is pretty easy to read and it's a good beginner book, if not the preferred beginner book, just mildly over hyped. I learned some new things, a good read.
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Summary: a good C book but not a reference or turtorial
Review: the book talks all the interesting aspects of C, and very useful if you are familiar with it. but not a good book if you need one for reference.
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Summary: OK, not great; some parts very confusing
Review: The bottom line is that I used this book to learn C and I program a lot in C now. However, I felt the section on arrays was insufficient. The book reads pretty well, but then once you try to sit down and code, you realize that the wool was being pulled over your eyes, that the description wasn't adequate enough, especially with regards to arrays. Steve Oualline does not devote enough time to these and doesn't place enough emphasis on the various forms that a pointer (and it's value) can take on. The examples on recursion are also very ambiguous.I haven't read any other books on learning C so I can't compare it with others, but in an absolute sense, I don't feel this book was all that great. This is my feeling nearly 2 years after having initially digested it for a class. I believe that there are some very important parts of ANSI C that were not discussed, like how to pass over a field with sscanf using the "%*_" instead of "%_". I think a better book would have saved me a lot of hours of debugging because it would have highlighted the areas that easy to make mistakes in,(for instance, counterintuitively having to use strcpy() instead of illegally reassigning a string once it's been intialized.)
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