Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours, Second Edition, shows you how to program in C in an easy-to-understand format. C is a powerful and flexible language used for a wide range of projects. You begin with learning the basics to write a first program and then move on to arrays, pointers, disk input/output, and functions. This book will allow you to understanding data types, loops, and strings to make your programs work for you. You'll also work with arrays, structures, and unions to expand your programming skills, use pointers to access and retrieve data elements, develop programs that process mathematical equations, functions, and variables, and explore memory management techniques.
What can you really cover in 24 hours of C? Basic things mostly. Because of how the book is devided, it's really a fast read. Minus points for some understatements, and mediocre examples. Also, some things are just left unexplained; for instance this -> num = getchar() - 48; So why is he subtracting exactly 48 to get a digit? No comment whatsoever. To some it's obvious, but first-timers might have to google. As someone mentions in review section, what's his deal with the main() function? Int, void, no type, and blend.
This book really should't be good, but it was. I bought it long before I knew what a computer science major was, let alone was one. At the time it didn't capture my imagination, it didn't convince me that I would one day be able to program the things I wanted to program. Ultimately though to whatever extent that was a problem, it was a problem with C. Throughout my college career this book served as a great C reference, it has nice examples and clear descriptions. Every time I returned to this book I appreciated it more, I will one day hopefully read "The C Programming Language", but in the meantime its distantly related hick cousin "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" is a good enough C reference.
Note: I had pretty good C/C++ foundation. I just needed to revise some stuff with C since I do not use it that much.
The book covers most of C basics, and some advanced topics such as preprocessor and micro statements.
What is missing is the whole picture of some functions. For example: gets(string); There is no warnings whatsoever about how dangerous this function is from a security aspect, which I think is very important for any software engineer to look at.
This text is great for anyone just starting out with C. I have to read this book to get a better grasp of what my school text book is talking about. It covers each individual nut and bolt of the things you need to learn to get started with C. My class text book would be a lot more difficult to understand if I wasn't reading this other text as well.