Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (2nd Edition) [Paperback]

Tony Zhang (Author), John Southmayd (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 067231861X | ISBN-13: 978-0672318610 | Publication Date: February 28, 2000 | Edition: 2

Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours, Second Edition, shows you how to program in C in an easy-to-understand format. C is a powerful and flexible language used for a wide range of projects. You begin with learning the basics to write a first program and then move on to arrays, pointers, disk input/output, and functions. This book will allow you to understanding data types, loops, and strings to make your programs work for you. You'll also work with arrays, structures, and unions to expand your programming skills, use pointers to access and retrieve data elements, develop programs that process mathematical equations, functions, and variables, and explore memory management techniques.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours, Second Edition, shows you how to program in C in an easy-to-understand format. C is a powerful and flexible language used for a wide range of projects. You begin with learning the basics to write a first program and then move on to arrays, pointers, disk input/output, and functions. This book will allow you to understanding data types, loops, and strings to make your programs work for you. You'll also work with arrays, structures, and unions to expand your programming skills, use pointers to access and retrieve data elements, develop programs that process mathematical equations, functions, and variables, and explore memory management techniques.

About the Author

Tony Zhang is a software engineer with more than 15 years of computer programming experience. Besides application-level programming experience in GUI, client/server, database, and networking, Tony has enhanced his system-level programming skills for X86 and advanced digital signal/image processors through his involvement on various projects. He is also the co-author of Sams Teach Yourself Perl 5 for Windows NT in 21 Days.

Product Details

• Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 2 edition (February 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067231861X
• ISBN-13: 978-0672318610
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #729,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > C > Tutorials

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get started fast., March 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I needed to learn enough C in an afternoon to grab data from a text file, modify it, and write it out to a new file. The examples and explanations were more than adequate to get the task done quickly. It is written in a format simple enough for first time programmers and introduces concepts quickly with efficient organization to keep those with prior programming experience motivated. One of the best programming books I have ever used.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great coverage of C basics, December 30, 2001

By 

Spin99 (Johannesburg, South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

Please note that I wouldn't recommend this book to a novice programmer. To a novice I'd say start with any flavour of Basic (BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

That said I'd like to add that I've found Tony Zhang's book to be very much to my liking.
The style is preety clear thanks to contributing author John Southmayd. I'd say this isn't the most pleasing or captivating read, but then maybe one shouldn't expect such from a technical book.
Not much attention is given to creating a good style but structured progamming is mentioned.
You get a very brief historical introduction and a nice technical guide on setting up your MS or Borland compiler to do the book's examples.
This book does have a thorough coverage of the basics. C concepts are well explained, such as data types, operators , pointers, arrays, strings, memory allocation and pre-compiler directives.

The book is very thorough in the way that it covers all the operators as well as I/O.

I also found quite compelling the way the author being Oriental uses Haiku poems to illustrate his examples.
Advanced types are covered but not advanced pointers except for a linked list example by the end. This is not an advanced book.

Appendixes are available from the publishers web site, pity these weren't printed with the book on the second edition. Also the author isn't available for contact on the e-mail address supplied.

If you are disciplined enough to go through all 24 one hour lessons in this book (I did it in 3 weeks) you should come out with some solid foundations and a good understanding of C.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, August 24, 2004

By 

Miss Nokiba "Eve" (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I absolutely did not know ANYTHING about programming. First chapter was a very simplified version of what will become a more complex outcome further on. The rest is filling in on details of math and vocabulary. By the fourth chapter it was very clear to me what is needed. In conclusion of the book you will be programming. Ive bought this book twice because by chapter six someone stole it. After reading this book i have understood most programming languages alot easier.