Beginning C

I haven't professionally developed software using the C programming language for several years and decided to pick up a book to refresh my skills. Beginning C: From Novice to Professional gently eases you into the concepts of writing, compiling, linking, and running C programs. Beginners should have no trouble learning the concepts addressed even if they have never written software before. I found myself jumping to the chapters on c-strings, structs, pointers, and arrays to refresh my memory on concepts that were a bit fuzzy to me. Since pointers are a stumbling block for many C programmers I was curious to see how well they were presented in this book. The author did a great job of articulating how manual memory management is performed using pointers and functions such as malloc() and calloc(). I was a little disappointed that the author did not clarify on when to use malloc() vs calloc() from a best practices perspective, but I suppose that might have been a bit more information than a beginner would have cared for anyway. Each chapter eases you into a new topic building on previously learned concepts. I think this book would make an excellent college textbook for an introduction to C programming. There are plenty of code samples throughout the book. I have no problem recommending this book for beginner and intermediate C programmers. Advanced C programmers may want to search elsewhere for a reference book.

It is really a very good book and Mr. Horton explains things very clear.If you want to learn C from the beginning this is maybe the best book.

I decided to do some WIN32 API programming and all of the old documentation and Petzold's book uses c source code so I thought a formal presentation would be the thing to do. This book gives a very good explanation of pointers using lots of small but complete programs. This book is much like a college text in that there are problems to solve at the end of each chapter. Horton makes you work but the writing is clear with appropriate detail. C is a small language but the syntax can be obscure so I appreciated the thorough and detailed treatment. Page layout and fonts are attractive and the source code is easy to follow. I plan to follow up with Horton's C++ book.