Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language at Bell Laboratories, in 1972, for implementing the UNIX operating system. Learn to program with C is a book whose stated goal is “to teach fundamental programming principles using C.” The author declares that the book “is more about teaching programming basics than it is about teaching C.” The book has ten chapters. Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, and 9 are dedicated to computer programming topics, while the other five--2, 6, 7, 8, and 10--discuss elements of the C language.

Topics covered on C programming include input and output, control flow, arrays, functions, and structures. The author advocates that you “get your hands dirty” in order to learn to program, and provides examples, explanations, and exercises in each chapter for hands-on learning. All examples can be downloaded and run on a computer with a modern C compiler.

The book lacks coverage of key programming topics and constructs either particular to C, such as pointers, or to programming in general, such as call by value and call by reference, the use of recursion, and self-referential data structures (see [1]). Coverage of those topics would have enhanced the content of chapter 7 on functions, 8 on arrays, and 10 on structures.

The content on how to program and how “to think logically” seems ad hoc, tacitly assuming that computer programming skill can be acquired through learning snippets of C code and some C constructs. The overall approach adopted by the book to its declared goal seems too low-level and confined to C.

The C language belongs to imperative, procedural, and structure-based paradigms, but a host of other paradigms exist, most notably object-oriented. Programming paradigms impact how one thinks about computer programs, and thus it would have provided a context for the book’s approach. The book’s claim that it is more about programming than about C seems unsubstantiated since the approach to programming is nowhere articulated or qualified.

This book may provide a gentle introduction to the C language for aspiring programmers, and may serve as a textbook for an introductory course to programming with C for junior college students in the humanities, social sciences, or the like.

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