Dan Gookin's C for Dummies is a two-volume tutorial for beginner C programmers that looks at the basics of programming from the ground up. It moves at a slow, but very logical, pace. If you've ever found traditional C programming books too hard, these two books might be worth a look. The author takes great care in presenting the basics of programming from the ground up and avoids complicated math and syntax wherever possible. The first volume covers the fundamentals of the language, such as basic language constructs, variable types, functions, program logic, looping, and simple console I/O. The second half presents more ANSI C functions, arrays, and strings. Only then does the author take on the difficulties of C pointers. The tutorial closes with some file I/O and the basics of using multi-file projects. Throughout these two books, the author succeeds in making programming fun with a lot of humor (including comics) and as little jargon as possible. The technical information is in there too, between the lines, in separate sections. Each chapter ends with a quiz to make sure you are getting all the basics of programming in C (answers are included at the end of volume two). Plenty of source code is provided for all examples. All in all, this set provides a really successful introduction to C programming, which can succeed where other tutorials fail. If you've been stumped by other introduction to C texts, check out these two books.
