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Old 24th November 2010
guitarscn guitarscn is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2008
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Default Book(s) for learning C as a first language?

I wasn't sure where to post this thread because the Book Reviews section seems to be only for book reviews and not asking what books to read. I thought this section would be more suitable although I was also considering posting this to Off-topic.

My first language ever was Visual Basic, but I was 11 years old at the time and it was just an elective class I had to take that was mandatory towards getting credits in order to graduate school, and I didn't even know what a programming language was back then. I thought I was just writing words on the screen to make the program do things (we made stuff like tic-tac-toe, shooting a basketball into a hoop by inputting correct coordinates/arch, etc.) I forgot everything I learned since then, so I have absolutely no recollection at all of VB except the "rem" statement which I recall as being equivalent to a comment in any other language.

Later when I began to rustle through much open source code and basically guessed what all the functions did and how the programs worked, I decided to learn a language and I had heard Python was easy so I started learning Python first. But before finishing the first chapter I was told by several people that Perl was much "better." Considering their opinion was probably better than mine, I switched to Perl and began on a book for beginners but again before I even learned the print function, I read that the first programming language one learns could be crucial to the person's future programming skills and habits that become ported to other programming languages they learn later on, and I don't want to develop any bad habits and practices. I've decided to choose C as my first language, for various personal reasons.

So, as a newbie with no knowledge in programming at all whatsoever and wanting to learn C, I bought K&R's The C Programming Language (2nd edition) as per the advice on the OpenBSD website (since that's the OS I use). I read the disclaimers in the intro of the book, and read on anyway. But the book seems to move very fast and does not elaborate too much on the features of the language, I guess due to the book not being total-noob-friendly. I can barely follow along and get what's going on, but have no idea what the terminologies and phrases being used in the book mean since the book assumes the reader knows basic programming.

Are there any books that are more noob-friendly that want to learn C as their first language?
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