It’s not easy to find the best book to learn C if you only start learning programming and try doing two things at the same time:
– learn programming basics in general;
– learn the C programming language itself.
In this situation C becomes the language that shapes your entire impression of what programming looks like.
And, since C is a very powerful programming language, you may get overwhelmed by the complexity of some concepts it relies on if the book you use doesn’t explain them well enough.
Is the C programming language simple or difficult?
Even though C is quite simple, while learning it you have to grasp several pretty difficult concepts, like pointers or bitwise operations.
Such things might be challenging even for experienced software developers, let alone those who have no experience in programming at all yet.
So, it’s important to learn C with a book which takes into account these two very different sides of C:
– in general this language is simple;
– some elements of this language are really difficult.
This means that as a beginner you shouldn’t use a thin book which represents C as something absolutely easy and self-explanatory.
But you also shouldn’t use a very thick book which might overcomplicate the explanation of those parts of the programming language that are easy to understand.
Your perfect book about C is a balanced book.
The book I used when I learned the C programming language
When I was learning the C programming language, I used the book Programming in C by Stephen G. Kochan.
It’s neither too short nor too long. It explains everything you need to know about programming in C from scratch, including all such notions as variables, arrays, loops, functions, etc.
Of course, it also covers all the advanced parts of C — pointers, linked lists, dynamic memory allocation, etc.
The language of the book is simple enough to make all the difficult parts of this programming language fairly easy to understand.
The author uses concise and precise metaphors, illustrates complicated ideas with simple pictures, and shows a lot of short code snippets explaining everything much better than many paragraphs of text could do.
Each chapter is followed by a set of exercises helping you put in practice everything you just learned.