I borrowed this book from library and believed I had made a right decision. Quoted from the book, Mr. Roberts have been teaching computer science for over 20 years, I'm not sure how long he has taught C language but I suppose this book is written in a way that he believes is most beneficial to the readers, based on his teaching experience.
C is a cryptic and complex language, so the author teaches in a stepwise manner, he hides the complexity by introducing his private libraries and data abstractions. So the readers implement the functionality of C, which is independent from the complexity of C; once the readers have enough grasp at C, they may move on to explore the complexity of C.
The author have done these with good intention because data types in ANSI C are limited in size, for example, the data type int is different from our perception of integer in daily life. The address operator & may be confusing as well.
How did I use the book? I rewrited all the examples presented in book without his private libaries. I did the exercises in the book without his private libraries as well. Instead of copying all his codes and getting them work, I tried to make errors: for example, in the simple hello world program, omitted the preprocessor operator #, then read the error messages. I also tried to improve the efficiency of my algorithm.
This maybe a good introductory book for people who have experience in programming in languages other than C since the syntax of C may confuse them, but owning it is not recommended.
