This is an awesome book. You'll have to be patient when going through it. And you'll learn a lot if you follow along with the examples and make everything work. It took me probably 6 hours just to get through chapter 2 - not because I can't read, but because I'm paying attention to every little detail, and making sure I learn what's going on.



The other thing that came as a big surprise, was that this is the best introduction to C i've come across. I've read quite a few books on C. Generally, I get through these other books on C - I get the syntax and pointers, and headers, etc. What I can never get through in these other C books, is that they use Math for all the examples. Which bores me, and sometimes frustrates me - because what I want to do with systems programming is not math - that's just me.



Of all the C books I've read, this one, and "C - A Reference Manual 5th Edition" are the best C books.



One pitfall in the book, is that with most of the examples, the conditionals to check pointers, and some other conditionals are somewhat amateur looking (that's just me). For example, in chapter 2, the "listlib.c" file has tons of conditionals like this:



list_t **newptrs;

if(headptr == NULL)

{

errno = EINVAL;

return -1;

}



That started to confuse me, why not just write:



list_t **newptrs;

if(!headptr)

{

errno = EINVAL;

return -1;

}



Which is ok. So there are many times where it seems the author is either purposefully writing conditionals to be verbose for readers, or doesn't know how to simplify with "not" flips.



Another example:



if(ptr != NULL)



can be simplified to:

if(ptr)



Other than those small things, this book is great.