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

by Tony Zhang (Author), John Southmayd (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
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.

From the Publisher
Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours gives beginning programmers everything they need to know to start writing their own programs in C, the most popular programming language and the core language taught in schools. It also provides a battery of skills to help readers reach the next level in programming. And with the bonus compiler included on the CD-ROM, Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours is a self-contained starter kit. - Teaches the basics of C programming in a proven, task-oriented format

- Provides a complete starter kit for beginning C programmers

- CD-ROM contains the authors' code and examples from the book and C compiler to run the programs --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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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
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #704,665 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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

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 Great way to learn C programming, January 23, 2000

By	David L. Van Popering (Long Island, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

Not knowing anything about C I read this book and learned a tremendous amount. I am now following it with the O'Reilly Practical C Programming and after reading these 2 and doing all of the exercises, I find I am totally confident to tell any interviewer "Yes, I AM a C programmer".

People get too hung up on the "24 hours" or "21 days" in the titles. Someone who is serious about learning will recognize that these are really "24 lessons" or "21 lessons". The point is that this book (and others in the series) are designed to be self-taught tutorials, each chapter building on the previous one.

Readers of these reviews must be aware that many who make a strike against these types of books are either not truly committed to their studies, or already have programming experience and have become 'reviewing snobs', forgetting what it is like to start out with little or no programming experience. I whole heartedly recommend this book, as well as many others from the Teach Yourself series.