Recently I downloaded Kindle for the Mac, and out of interest I chose the Kindle version of Learn C on the Mac to experience Kindle in action. The Kindle version did not display any book page numbers which was immensely frustrating since it was hard to gauge where I was in the book without referring back to the table of contents. Not a satisfying user experience.



The book itself is a little higher in quality than complete drek but by a narrow call. Most of the code is built around creating a DVD library - using the terminal for all input and output - a very historical if not dated approach more suited to a 386 PC from the 80s. It is a very simple project, too simple in my opinion for what the Mac has to offer. Code slices are available from the book's website. A long list of bugs are reported by readers on the website along with author responses. Some of the bugs are just down to bad proof reading, but others are more serious. e.g. operator confusion. Towards the end of the book, a short piece on binary trees and searching is preceded by an even shorter piece on recursion (using factorial as exemplar). The author professes himself a fan of Knuth's work so surely something more substantial could have been presented.



In summary the book takes one straightforward terminal focused I/O application and uses it deliver brief illustrations of C constructs and mechanisms. Apart from a couple of screen-shots from XCode at the beginning, a reader could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a time warp of C presentation from 20 or more years ago. Objective-C and Cocoa get mentions that are so brief as to be useless. The 'Mac' component in the book in my opinion is irrelevant. There are better C texts, more substantial and more challenging.

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