Customer Reviews

Beginning C: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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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.

Starting from K&R in college, have gone thru several books on C & C++ in 16 years. Only very few books fell in the category of "trash". Several books are indeed decent and serve their purpose. C is such a beautiful & structured language for learning the programming concepts. But it has to be explained in a simple way. This book is built on the same method, keep it simple but not too simple. There are not any development in the C language in the last decade as compiler writers concentrate on C++ though keeping C inside. So are books 'teching how to program in C'. May be the author had fixed some coding or typos in this fourth edition, I did not expect anything 'changed' compared to his old editions.

The content is really good and the way the book is structured is nice. There is a chapter on pointers, well written. Then the pointers are imposed on the subsequent chapters. Surprisingly the 'struct' is part of "data structures" instead of part of C language as in other books. I like the way, so the learner won't get confused. There is also a flash on linked lists, binary trees.

This is not a book on "Pointers & C" or "Algorithms & C" or "Datastructures & C" but a book on "Programming in C".

Overall, this book takes a place in the recommended book list of programming in C.

I went back to C programming after programmin in other languages for a bit. This book gives excellent and clear explanations of concepts, including pointers/strings and arrays. The book has many example programs in each chapter are well thought out and make the concepts clear.

This would be an excellent book to learn from or if your going back to C from some time away. Despite the Beginning C title it covers a lot of topic (preprocessing/# defines etc.). It mainly covers C syntax and isn't a how to design a program kind of book.

I find it makes an excellent reference as well and I reach for it more often than the other C books I have which are both decent , Kernighan and Richie book and the more advanced. "C: A Reference Manual (5th Edition)" .

I read Ivor Horton's Beginning C to gain some familiarity with the C programming language. As a security professional, being able to grasp the essence of C helps me understand security advisories and related discussion of vulnerabilities in exploits. Beginning C is a great book for a person like me, but it also appears to be the right book for someone who wants to become a legitimate C programmer. I highly recommend it to both sorts of readers.

The author is an expert writer and teacher. It is easy to follow his explanations and he manages to include some humor in what could otherwise be a very dry topic. As a text, Beginning C offers numerous complete code examples, clear figures, helpful tables and charts, and exercises for motivated readers. The publisher provides source code for the book's examples plus source code for solutions to the exercises. It's like an entire class in book form.

I would probably not recommend this book to someone who has a strong programming background. A person who is already a professional programmer would prefer a more stripped-down book (perhaps C in a Nutshell?) that avoids explaining the core ideas of general programming. However, for a non-professional programmer like me, I found the book to be appropriate.

If you're looking for a modern, informative, well-written book on C, look no further than Beginning C!

This book is written in a Course Reference Text style with clearly worked examples, chapter summaries and exercises (with code and solutions to exercises on line), explaining and reinforcing code usage. I can recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn or re-acquaint themselves with C. The clear code explanations enable the author to include some clever coding techniques, e.g. the conditional operator ?: with the examples providing a useful basis for your own coding efforts. Coding examples in the book are not specific to Windows or Unix/Linux/Mac, though a Windows example is included to show how to escape the "\" character in file path strings. Examples are well chosen with alternative approaches (e.g. pointer and non-pointer solutions) provided to solve a given programming challenge as new material is covered. Larger example programs are fleshed out as you work through the chapter illustrating the code development process. Some of the programs become quite sophisticated, such as a full Othello game.

The book commences with an outline chapter of how a C program is produced, the components of a C program and the design, implementation and testing process. Chapter 2 goes in to detail on the different C variable types, how they use memory and how the compiler handles conversions between variable types. The different options available in C to make decisions are covered in Chapter 3, which feeds into the different loop constructs in Chapter 4. Arrays are introduced in Chapter 5, which naturally extends into how strings and text are managed in Chapter 6. This naturally segues into pointer usage in Chapter 7, and how this can be used as an alternate (and often better way) of manipulating arrays. Pointer usage is appropriately given a large amount of coverage in the book, with the pointer chapter comprising 10 percent of the book and subsequent chapters building on the foundations of this chapter. Chapter 8 looks at the importance of structuring your program using functions, how variable scope assists with compartmentalising your program development and maintenance, how to pass and return data and how pointers can assist with this process, with Chapter 9 going into greater depth on functions. Input from the keyboard and output to the screen and printer are covered in chapter 10, which introduces input and output streams and character formatting. Formatted and binary file reading, writing and updating is provided in chapter 12 (about 10% of the book). Data structures are covered well in chapter 11, showing the power of using pointers to structure members. How to share memory between variables is covered as is how to define your own data types. Those with a specific interest in embedded programming, where storage is tight and techniques to change and access bits in an I/O register will be disappointed with the brief coverage of bit-fields. The book is rounded out with a final chapter on the supporting features you should be looking for in your C programming IDE, with preprocessor macros, directives, conditional compilation and debugging methods covered along with a brief foray into date and time library functions.

There are four Appendices followed by a 33 page index.
A. Computer Arithmetic - binary and hexadecimal numbers, negative binary numbers, Big and Little Endian Systems and Floating Point numbers
B. ASCII Character Code Definitions - but no mention of unicode, despite unicode formatting being covered in the text.
C. Reserved Words in C - the power of C is ably demonstrated by the fact that so much can be done with just 37 reserved words!
D. Input and Output Format Specifications (this is a useful reference supporting the many worked examples provided in several chapters)

My only complaint is that here are more errors in this book (albeit minor) than I'd expect in a Fourth Edition. Book errata is available on line and the author did respond to some errors I submitted.

I am starting out in programming (apps for Apple) and had ZERO knowledge of it before. I had bought some of the other Apress books and even though they were recommended as starter books they quickly lost me in a few chapters in. This book (though I'm only 1/4 the way in) has been a BREEZE!! Its breaking everything down, having me do starting sample programs and baby-stepping me to the hows and why of what I am doing! Its starts you off from square one and progresses you into the harder stuff at a perfect pace, making sure you know how and why each step of the way!

I bought this book to get an introduction to C, however I found it lacking since I already had some programming experience (Perl, Python, Scheme, Emacs Lisp). As far as C goes, this book is complete and covers things in great detail, for example workings with memory. Since C is "close to the hardware," I think this material is the book's strongest attribute. The explanations of pointers are also really good. Again, pointers are one of the most important aspects of C, so if that's what you need, this book could help you. I surely learned a lot about C from this book, unfortunately I was turned off by the silly examples (e.g., organizing basketball scores).

I don't recommend this book for someone with a mathematical background like myself (I would have rather had more abstract problems in combinatorics or numerical analysis). I learned as much about pointers from C Programming Language (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software), and learned even more from that book about good programming practice, and the idiosyncrasies of C programming (while (c = getchar()) ;). If you already have some background in programming, or you need more realistic examples, get C Programming Language (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software) instead. If you have no experience, then this book would be a good place to start.

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 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.