Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days (6th Edition)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Let's make things clear: This book teaches the ANSI C Programming Language.

It does not teach any of the following...
* Windows Programming
* Algorithm design
* Object Oriented Programming
* C++
* Advanced Programming

In 1996, when I first began to learn programming, I bought the first edition of this, along with about 5 books. Very quickly I had set all the rest aside.
In 5 years, it is the best book on pure C programming I had found, and I still refer to it on occasion.
It does not burden the reader with unnecessary abstract explanations. Nor does it gloss over features. This is not a Dummies Book. A novice may need to pore over certain sections repeatedly before some of the more complex concepts "click". But by dilligently compiling the examples, and attempting the practice exercises, the reader can gain a thorough understanding of C.
Thanks in part to this book I am now pursuing a successful career in software engineering. End of story.

I found the book to be well-written, easy to follow and the examples more or less accurate for most compilers. As an introduction to the C language, the book contains a suprising amount of in-depth material, but it is primarily an introductory course. The accompanying CD contains a pre-assessment and post-assessment test, both of which contained 1 or 2 erroneous answers. Hopefully these errors will be corrected in future editions. Also, the assessment tests were fairly elementary and did not cover all of the material presented in the course. The CD also contains all of the source code used in the text.

I think this book does a great job of teaching the C language. And I am going to be frank about those people who gave it low reviews: They simply lack the necessary pre-requisite knowledge to understand programming.

If you don't know what a program is, etc, you are not ready to learn programming. You need to learn the basics of how computers work first.

Second, to the person who said "I couldn't get anything to work". Obviously, you were doing something wrong as most of the examples work fine with no modifications on a wide varity of platforms and compilers.

Yes I did find some errors in the included code samples. But although I have not yet completed the book, it appears to me that by the time a reader gets to the sample code with errors, they should already have enough knowledge from reading the material to find the errors and fix them.

For example, listing 5.5 fails to pass an argument when it calls a function. However, by the time you get to this section of the chapter, if you were paying attention, you should already know enough about functions to see that this program is obviously not going to work unless an argument is passed to the function being called. And you should also already know enough to figure out what argument you need to pass. If you don't catch the problem while entering the code, you should certainly see what the problem is when the compiler generates an error message when you try to build the program.

There are also a few programs that although they work under most compilers, would work better under some with a few modifications.

I use the Type & Run 2 example, which is a number guessing game. The book uses variable type "int" to store the number you have to guess.

Well, my FreeBSD box is a 32bit system instead of a 16 bit system. As such, variable type int is 4 bits long instead of 2 like on DOS compilers. This makes for a number guessing game with over 2 billion possible numbers. A pretty futile number guessing game in my opinion. However, once again by this time, if you are paying attention, you should know the variable type sizes of your system. And you should also be able to figure out a way to fix this program if you were paying attention. It is a simple matter of using a different variable type to store the number you have to guess. By this point in the chapter, you should know how to do this if you were paying attention.

All in all, I think this book does a great job, and the few examples that do contain errors or need modifications to work well on particular systems all come after you should already have enough knowledge to fix them.

This is my first Sams book ever, and Ive always heard how bad Sams books are. All I can say is wow. It is a great book for a C Beginner. Teaching all the basics to get you going. My only concern is the title. I read the C section in a couple days and still refer to it as a reference for help. However I feel the title is quite misleading, I think thats why people hate Sams so much (or just the teach yourself series). Although I read the book faster than 21Days I am no expert even 21days after reading the book. What the book should state is it will teach your the basic building blocks in C such as the ANSI Libraries, and a few specific Compiler libraries. And should eventually help you understand C so you can learn other libraries available to you.

There are also some minor bad programming things taught such as using gets() for input however later in the book it although not obvious at first glance that it shows you a better way such as fgets(). Its also a reason I gave it 4 instead of 5, the other is the information on Linked Lists although its good it doesnt go indepth on Deleting a Node in a linked list, other than a small excerpt which doesnt make sense unless you read it a couple of times.

What I liked were the Exercises, without them I probably wouldnt have learnt as quickly my only thing about them is that some of them supply answers although this is good it was a bit tempting to just use the answer.

I never thought I'd see the day when I was comfortable with C again (having been out of it for almost 10 years), but that day is here and it's arrived because I read this book. It's neither an easy read nor a quick one, but it's well worth the effort. Take the time to go through the examples (with or without a debugger), and do the exercises at the end of each chapter. You won't be sorry!

Despite all the hype for C# and C++, if you know and understand C, you could probably write those other languages. C can get very complex (as far as numerous functions and libraries) but the basics are covered pretty well in this book. I haven't read the latest edition (mind has no edition # on the outside and has a mail order form to get the source code on floppies, heh) but the authors are solid writers and this was the first book I read to learn C. It covers the essentials, but does skip (at least in the edition I read) the more extraneous things that most authors skip, such as function pointers and sometimes unions. It also does not explain the common programming ideas, like hash tables and linked lists, however, I would highly recommend this book if you're just starting out. You might wanna grab a book on more advanced programming or a C algorithms book and then maybe a special interest book like SDL or OpenGL, but this is a great introduction to the language itself.

Hi, i recommend this book to everyone. Listen, I'm 14 years old, and with this book, i can say that I now am a C programmer, really, it's a really great way to learn C... a lot of examples, step by step explanations, and everything is covered in this book, from memory management to pointers.

I just finished the book a few hours ago, reading it over a period of about a week (I bought it to refresh the little I knew about C in the first place and hammer in some details).

Overall, I actually really liked it. Usually I'd probably mock one of these books, but this one, unlike many others in the Sam's series, is pretty decent. A lot of the questions I had along the way were answered immediately. The latter chapters (15-18 or 19) are a bit muddy, but will give you enough of an idea to go further. I should stress though that this *is* an introductory book. It will *not* teach you more advanced concepts, especially if you plan on doing effective UNIX development. It will definitely give you a solid basis to explore further concepts though!

One big big complaint. The editing of this book really sucked major ass. There are tons of typos, mostly in the code, which could really throw people who haven't programmed before off. Additionally there are other mistakes and screw-ups in the body of the text, as well as the answers to the quizzes and so forth. Finally, the questions posted at the end of the day (quiz/review) are sometimes pretty badly worded, but that's a minor nuisance compared to the above.

Overall, definitely don't regret buying this.

The book has a great structure, there is 21 chapters/days total about C and an extra 7 chapters about other languages basic beyond C; Java, C#, and C++. There are however many defects to this book, there are many typos that I was able to spot, and there are no answers to some of the questions. I really enjoyed doing the Bug Busters section at the end of the chapters and would like to see more in the next editions of the book.

Master programmers may be better off buying something like the C books by Dennis Ritchie or Guy Steele, but if you're a beginning programmer who wants to learn C as your first or second programming language, this would be a great book to learn from.