When I bought it I thought I may have been falling for a meme,

How much programming knowledge did you have beforehand OP?

>>62421681
A good bit.

I've mostly worked in Java, C++ and Python but wanted to learn C. Definitely not a book for beginners.

>>62421711
I think the meme comes from people trying to learn from this starting at scratch.

>>62421734
I'm not sure how anyone could. You'd have to be a mega autist to have no experience and actually get something from this book starting out.

>>62421734
>>62421754
Fug, I was going to do this. Where should I start instead?

>reading a reference book cover-to-cover

>>62422003
The o reilly books have lower learning curve.

>>62422003
Speaking of O'Reilly, I recommend Head First C. It looks like it's written for retarded teens, because it is. But I could teach my grandma to write C with it.
Buy a physical copy. Or print the pdf if you pirate it, and do the fucking exercises. I have successfully tutored complete idiots in writing passable C with it.

>>62422003
Take a look at beej's guide to C: http://beej.us/guide/bgc/
The author wrote the de facto standard guide for Linux network programming. It skips all the archaic and algorithmic parts of K&R and does a better job at teaching the basics of C.

>>62422003
Go to wiki.installgentoo.com (or the waybackmachine archive of it if it is still down) and read the "programming language and concepts" article, also check out the "recommended programming books".
tl;dr, just buy/download "the C programming language" and read it cover to cover and do all the exercises, It's tough but it's super good. Read ut with nearly 0 knowledge, took my time, there's nothing difficult about it. Also watch computerphile videos on youtube, all of them,especially the ones about turing machine and recursion. Finally you should check out MIT lecture of SICP on youtube to get a good introduction on what is a progralling language (install Racket if you want a scheme interpreter and want to do the exercises of the video)

>>62421526
The UNIX Programming Environment is a good companion book.

>>62422003
SICP

>>62426869
>check SICP a month ago
>read some pages
>it's using lisp
fuck that shit