Ooble

I've been a big fan of Dan Gookin since I picked up the very first edition of C for Dummies, Volume 1. With the Desk Reference, he's combined both Volume 1 and Volume 2, and made sure everything (well, almost everything - like any programming books, there are errors) is compliant with the standard.

Gookin's attitude towards teaching is "make it work now, and worry about how it works later", which I think is brilliant - instead of explaining how the puts works in the first chapter, he concentrates on what it does (don't worry - he starts on printf soon enough).

The "book" is actually seven books rolled into one, or so the contents page would have you believe. One of those is the appendix, which doesn't count. And there's another one devoted just to linked lists, which is a little dubious. But anyway, because of this, it's really suitable for most programmers - if you can already code C at a basic level, just skip the "Basic" book.

What really does it for me is the author's sense of humour. You don't feel like you're working, you feel like you're having fun. Learning C. Y'know, that language everyone loves to hate. He really makes it easy for the newbie to understand the more cryptic areas of the language and standard library (until he hits pointers, of course, which no one understands first time).

It's a good book. If you don't have one on C you like, go buy it.

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