It's really a shame that this book gets a bad rap. It's mostly because of a chapter it used to have critiquing K&R (which I thought made a good point) and possibly the online persona of the author (again, I don't agree, but I can see why others might have a problem)

In any case -- it's a great book for beginners, freely available online, and you'll know in 5 minutes whether you like the style or not.

I am, by no means, an expert in C, actually I'm a beginner. When I started reading K&R I was aware of the time it was written and how it follows certain premises. When I saw several arguments with Zed Shaw going on here, most of the time I've got the image of someone that wouldn't like to accept he was wrong in some ways. I'm not trying to take the value out of his work, I think Learn C The Hard Way is a great way to learn C, but as you said, his online persona didn't help much.