Agreed. (yes, did a lot of C in the mid/early 90s that ran on sundry unices, DOS, OS/2, Windows & VAX). Ouch.
"The C Programming Language" isn't that great of a book, either. I had FAR better luck making sense of C (after having been in school for almost 4 years, and working part time on another language for almost 2 years) with the book "C, An Advanced Introduction" (1st version, not "ANSI Edition"), by Narain Gehani. For somebody transitioning from real high level languages, the array/pointer/string swamp was a real source of anti-productivity fun and games until explained by somebody other than its creators.
> If you read "The C Programming Language", you'll realize that in the ~240 pages of text, you know basically every feature of the language.
Except for those little compiler specific little issues, it seems:
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/226
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/232
> It's small, and it's elegant, and it's portable
Have you had the pleasure to port C code across multiple C compilers and OS in the mid-90's?