I felt some conflict over how to rate this. The gimmicky BS, sprawling waste of my time and money in its conceptual repetitiveness, and ADHD-oriented antipedagogical style is worth a two-star rating at best, and some of the author's inherent biases might edge it down to being worth less than one star. The way it focuses on the pragmatic necessities of writing C programs for a variety of purposes, starting with the simple basics that make it easy to get started on writing small and useful utilities for one's own daily use, on the other hand, was a refreshing change of pace from the utter failure of every other C book I've encountered to do so. In fact, this book covered some of the material that every C programmer should learn, but pretty much no books ever teach.

I ended up giving it two stars, because no matter how nice it is to find a book that covers the topics this book covers, it's just not right to give a book so badly written and formatted an even marginally good rating. It's still worth reading for the information in it, once you get past the highly distracting whirlwind of nonsense and conga line of dancing pigs.

edit: I suppose it should not surprise me that, as of this edit, there are only three other readers who have bothered to give it a review, and one of them is a duplicate of another that is essentially a contentless one-liner. A book written for people with pathologically short attention spans and a need for faddish gimmicks to keep them interested would not, generally, seem like the kind of thing to elicit thoughtful reviews even from those who liked it. ( )