Rating: 
Summary: A Good Beginning Book...
Review: A while back I bought this book, backtracking from C++ to C. I took off on this book, skimming through the first few chapters, until I finally started to work on the examples. I went through, but once and a while the book seems to take off and it takes a few runs through the chapter onces again to get the hang of it.In sum, I would recommend this book with another reference. You really need a second book whenever you are learning another programming language to cross-reference.
Rating: 
Summary: For beginners only
Review: For someone with little experience in programming, this book is an excellent introduction to the syntax of C and the various components of a C program. The approach is to present a series of small programs that do little more than display the results so that a novice can see the operation(s) in action. However, if you have some programming experience, you will most likely be bored, and that state will appear fairly quickly.
Most of the programs are under thirty lines, which includes the header for the main function, comment for program name, include lines and separate lines for the opening and closing curly braces. This is not to say that all of the major features of the language are not demonstrated, in that respect, the author is thorough. What is lacking is some sense of what the language can do, and that really cannot be done with programs that do nothing but demonstrate.
One feature that I found rather odd is that the author puts in way too much unnecessary documentation. Comments like /* main() function *.
main() /* GetDateTime() definition */
void GetDateTime(void) /* function definition */
void StrCopy(char *str1, char *str2) are totally unnecessary and clutter the code.
On the good side, the author does a good job demonstrating all the major features of the C language by showing each of them in action. However, on the bad side, that is all that is done and you get no real sense of how the features can be combined to do something useful. With few exceptions, the programs do not show you how to do anything of value.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: I absolutely did not know ANYTHING about programming. First chapter was a very simplified version of what will become a more complex outcome further on. The rest is filling in on details of math and vocabulary. By the fourth chapter it was very clear to me what is needed. In conclusion of the book you will be programming. Ive bought this book twice because by chapter six someone stole it. After reading this book i have understood most programming languages alot easier.
Rating:
Summary: Does its job... but no more
Review: I am a seasoned VB programmer who was thinking of learning some other, more low level languages for my personal interest. I purchased this book since I wanted to quickly get an introduction to C before exploring it more thouroughly. I am about halfway through this book and am quite pleased. It clearly explains the concepts covered and has very demonstrative examples. I found the excercises at the end to be a little too easy unfortunatly. The answers were generally only 10-20 lines long. They each seemed to cover one point and one point only. This is what I believe is the main problem with the book. It does not tie concepts together very well. On the whole a good book, teaches the syntax but much more is needed to gain more than a rudamentary understanding of the language.
Rating:
Summary: Great Intro.
Review: I have read an earlier edition of this book. I have to say it is the best intro to C I have ever read. None of the campy "For Dummies"-ish stuff. Just clear, concise, easy to read and understand descriptions.
Tony Zhang is an amazing writer when it comes to making programming concepts accessible.
Rating: 
Summary: How "not" to learn anything.
Review: I suppose I might have learned more from this book had the programming examples been compatible with the compiler included on the cd in the book. However, since none of Zhang's examples would execute with the Borland Compiler version included I can not give this book an unbiased rating.
Rating:
Summary: Tricky title, but good book
Review: I'm learning C programming by reading Tony's book. And I found the book is not bad at all. In fact, the book starts with some easy materials, and step by step, leads the reader to relatively deep area in C. Of course, the title of the book is a little bit tricky. Don't expect you can learn C in 24 hours. Also, you need to have an ANSI C compliant compiler to compile those sample programs in the book. The enclosed Borland TC compiler is an old version that is not 100% ANSI C compliant. To be fair, I think the book is a clearly-written, well-organized book for a serious beginner.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Starter
Review: Not knowing anything about C I read this book and learned a tremendous amount. I am now following it with the O'Reilly Practical C Programming and fter reading these 2 and doing all of the exercises, I find I am totally confident to tell any nterviewer "Yes, I AM a C programmer". People get too hung up on the "24 hours" or "21 days" in the titles. Someone who is serious about learning will recognize that these are really "24 lessons" or "21 lessons". The point is that this book (and others in the series) are designed to be self-taught tutorials, each chapter building on the previous one. Readers of these reviews must be aware that many who make a strike against these types of books are either not truly committed to their studies, or already have programming experience and have become 'reviewing snobs', forgetting what it is like to start out with little or no programming experience. I whole heartedly recommend this book, as well as many others from the Teach Yourself series.
Rating:
Summary: Great coverage of C basics
Review: Please note that I wouldn't recommend this book to a novice programmer. To a novice I'd say start with any flavour of Basic (BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). That said I'd like to add that I've found Tony Zhang's book to be very much to my liking.
The style is preety clear thanks to contributing author John Southmayd. I'd say this isn't the most pleasing or captivating read, but then maybe one shouldn't expect such from a technical book.
Not much attention is given to creating a good style but structured progamming is mentioned.
You get a very brief historical introduction and a nice technical guide on setting up your MS or Borland compiler to do the book's examples.
This book does have a thorough coverage of the basics. C concepts are well explained, such as data types, operators , pointers, arrays, strings, memory allocation and pre-compiler directives. The book is very thorough in the way that it covers all the operators as well as I/O. I also found quite compelling the way the author being Oriental uses Haiku poems to illustrate his examples.
Advanced types are covered but not advanced pointers except for a linked list example by the end. This is not an advanced book. Appendixes are available from the publishers web site, pity these weren't printed with the book on the second edition. Also the author isn't available for contact on the e-mail address supplied. If you are disciplined enough to go through all 24 one hour lessons in this book (I did it in 3 weeks) you should come out with some solid foundations and a good understanding of C.
Rating:
Summary: great book, but no downloads for computer codes
Review: this is a good book to get one started with C language. The explanations are clear and concise. The downside is that there is no download for computer codes used for examples, so one has to type in all the listings.
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