I was looking for a good C book to cover the basics (I'm a fairly advanced C++ programmer and wanted a book that would cover a lot of practical ground, what to do and not do in C, design issues, etc). Since O'Reilly has some of the best practical programming books around: Programmming Perl, Learning Perl, Programming Python, Learning bash, etc, etc, I naturally picked up Practial C Programming. I was totally disapointed. The only other C book I had/have read is Mastering Standard C, by Rex Jaeschke, and by comparison Mastering Standard C is far, far superior. I haven't read K&R (yet!) so I won't compare one way or another there. In any case, I would recommend this book to neither a beginner (too confusing and lots of bad sugesstions, IMO) nor an expert (nothing to give). However, I will readily admit that what works for one person will not for another, and this sort of thing is _very_ subjective.