Rating  - Walk before you can run
This is a jewel that should not be missed. It is a tad dated; so that is why I just stumbled across it. And it does have a few faux pas; however the will not get in the way of learning the basic concepts needed to master the language.
By concentrating on the concepts of pointers and filtering out all the peripheral clutter involved in today's complex programming environment we can get a strong grasp of pointers and see the patterns automatically with out having to translate the symbols as some foreign language.
For people who are just casually interested, in pointers there is an added bonus of reading about compilers and companies that and long gone but made their mark in history.
Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming (Scientific and Engineering Computation)
Rating  - Errors galore make this book rate lower than one star
Chapter 7 "Pointers and Memory Allocation", pages 102 & 103:
"The strlen() function returns the total number of bytes in the string including the NULL." This is completely incorrect. Any reading of the ANSI-C standard or even K&R will tell you this function never includes the null-terminator in the count. Further exacerbating the situation are the listings written to allocate memory based on this faulty statement.
Chapter 7 "Pointers and Memory Allocation", page 135:
The author attempts to show how one can [incorrectly] write a function to accept a variable number of integer arguments. Any compiler would return an error stating something to the effect of "too many arguments to function 'add'".
Chapter 7 "Pointers and Memory Allocation", page 146:
This last example from the book intends to show [again - incorrectly] how to return a pointer from a function call. The code listed has a subtle but common error most beginners make - returning a reference to a local variable.
char *combine (s, t)
char *s, *t;
{
int x, y ;
char r[100] ;
strcpy (r, s) ;
y = strlen (r) ;
for (x = y ; *t != '\0' ; ++x)
r[x] = *t++ ;
r[x] = '\0' ;
return (r) ;
}
There are many, many more errors like this that render the book useless. In addition, these same errors can be found repeated almost line for line in his other published works ("Master C Pointers" ISBN 0126974098, "Conquering C++ Pointers" ISBN 0126974209). One would be better advised to spend their money on something more factually correct and readable such as:
The C Programming Language, Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie, ISBN 0131103628
C: How to Program (any edition), Harvey Deitel & Paul Deitel, ISBN 0132404168 (5th Ed)
C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions, Steve Summit, ISBN 0201845199
C Programming: A Modern Approach (any edition), K. N. King, ISBN 0393979504 (2nd Ed)
The Standard C Library, P.J. Plauger, ISBN 0131315099
Rating  - surprisingly excellent condition
The book arrived early and for an older book was practically new!
Rating - Excellent for Beginners
This book really teaches the novice C programmer pointers. It sparked my interest in pointers and has helped me to understand pointers. I use this book for reference all the time. If you want to get a good understanding of pointers, this is a good book to read. I am learning C++, and I still use this C book as a reference to refresh my memory with some fundamental concepts. It is very easy to read too. Perfect for the beginner. I docked off a star because the writer uses turbo c and MS DOS; it's kind of an old-school book. Nonetheless, Traister explains the concepts very well, which is all I need from it.
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