The point of the example is to explain pointers by starting with a more familiar concept: indexed arrays. It would help if you were referring to the book; the authors note more than once that "the programs are intended to be illustrative, not bullet-proof."
Understanding the precedence and order of evaluation of operators is fundamental to mastery of any programming language (chapter 2.12 in K&R). All C code must "rely on" the order of operations, and if an indirect assignment through a pointer with post-increment is confusing... well that's the point I was making in the first place.
Java is considered verbose for a number of reasons. It has a number of variable modifiers, it uses long names(which are generally good but can be stupid, especially in some cases of identifying multiple abstraction levels), and because it lacks type inference for generics and collection literals. c frequently makes the opposite mistakes with tiny cryptic or non whole word names. C lacks generic programming, it does do a decent job with initializers but unfortunately those can only be used at initialization.