Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book does a very good job of explaining C to the beginner. It gives the reader easy to understand examples and exercises to practice what you are learning. Zhang's explanation of arrays and pointers (two of the most confusing topics for those learning C) are easy to understand, even for the complete beginner with no programming skills.

The only reason I did not rate this higher was the lack of appendices, which are needed for the answers to the exercises at the end of every chapter.

All of the beginning topics are well covered in this book, as well as some topics you would expect to find in an advanced text such as Kernighan & Richie's "The C Programming Language", which is one of the books recommended at the end of this book (and is also recommended by every C programmer on the face of the earth for that matter!)

Overall, this is an excellent book for the beginner through intermediate C programmer.

I am only a beginner programmer, and found that the book was pretty easy to follow.

I was however, a bit disappointed by the fact that the author never really explained very well WHY you use these valuable functions, pointers, arrays, etc.

Also, I thought that the exercises at the back of each chapter tended to throw you in the deep end towards the end of the book. I found I was constantly refering to the answers in the back of the book to figure everything out, which doesn't build your confidence much! I think they would have been better having more exercises in each chapter to complete, starting off very simply and then getting harder in order for you to really grasp the concepts.

On the plus side though, the book is short and concise and allows you to whiz through the C language. Then you can move on more quickly to fry bigger fish - C++ and windows programming!

The book was good and informative. Its approach to the C Programming language was systematic and it offers a good basis for understanding the C language. Obviously it is an introduction, to be learned in 24 hours, and thus does not cover more advanced topics such as graphics and binary trees. Occasionally certain areas of the book could be slightly incoherent, but generally it was written and well planned. I recommend it as an introductary text to all those beginning C.

I hardly got anything out of this book. Understanding pointers was difficult, and the brief explanations weren't helpful. I can't imagine how someone else would learn C.

If you want to learn C with good programming practise, skill and techniques, get Teach youself C in 21 days. You'll have a better time.

I am a seasoned VB programmer who was thinking of learning some other, more low level languages for my personal interest. I purchased this book since I wanted to quickly get an introduction to C before exploring it more thouroughly. I am about halfway through this book and am quite pleased. It clearly explains the concepts covered and has very demonstrative examples. I found the excercises at the end to be a little too easy unfortunatly. The answers were generally only 10-20 lines long. They each seemed to cover one point and one point only. This is what I believe is the main problem with the book. It does not tie concepts together very well.

On the whole a good book, teaches the syntax but much more is needed to gain more than a rudamentary understanding of the language.

For someone with little experience in programming, this book is an excellent introduction to the syntax of C and the various components of a C program. The approach is to present a series of small programs that do little more than display the results so that a novice can see the operation(s) in action. However, if you have some programming experience, you will most likely be bored, and that state will appear fairly quickly.
Most of the programs are under thirty lines, which includes the header for the main function, comment for program name, include lines and separate lines for the opening and closing curly braces. This is not to say that all of the major features of the language are not demonstrated, in that respect, the author is thorough. What is lacking is some sense of what the language can do, and that really cannot be done with programs that do nothing but demonstrate.
One feature that I found rather odd is that the author puts in way too much unnecessary documentation. Comments like

/* main() function *.
main()

/* GetDateTime() definition */
void GetDateTime(void)

/* function definition */
void StrCopy(char *str1, char *str2)

are totally unnecessary and clutter the code.
On the good side, the author does a good job demonstrating all the major features of the C language by showing each of them in action. However, on the bad side, that is all that is done and you get no real sense of how the features can be combined to do something useful. With few exceptions, the programs do not show you how to do anything of value.

You can't really beat the price point, but you get what you pay for: a cheap book that leaves you to puzzle over unproofed code that seg faults, to work out the theoretical model of C's operation on your own, and to wonder, what, exactly, real-world, practical applications of the various functions might be. If you've ever wanted to read forty pages all about "Hello World", but three paragraphs on how to code across multiple files, this is your book. Otherwise, do yourself a favor, and spend those 24 hours of C with a superior tutorial, or god forbid, a real instructor.