It's with stressing how different the K&R book is from books in the past that introduce a programming language. Usually those sort of books are fairly long and you end up with a decent but incomplete understanding.

With K&R, it's quite short, it's an easy going read, and yet when you get to the end you've covered the whole of C (even the standard library!).

Let's be controversial. K&R is lovely, I learned from it, everything good everyone says about it is true and K & R and both beautiful, sexy, clever, kind and wonderous men.

If you are learning programming (and who among us isn't?), the code examples stink to high heaven. No really. Don't program like that! K&R didn't! If you're learning programming and C it will teach you a bunch of really bad habits /because/ it is a book for experienced programmers with fully developed taste and the examples were designed to illustrate a particular facet of the language as pithily as possible. It's great for that.

I realize any criticism of the sacred texts will result in inspiring revulsion and possibly bile among those who think of such things as above criticism and any commentary is about the shortcomings of the commentator not the holy book but there it is... It's 2022 and I'm old enough to take it. ;-)

Alistair Moffat "Programming, Problem Solving and Abstraction" is one I found that seems better to learn C programming. Maybe other people have better recommendations than that..?

Separate to that "The C Puzzle Book" is superb when you're learning to really thoroughly understand pointers, arrays and so on. Koenig's "C Traps and Pitfalls" isn't bad for some of the dark corners.

I didn't give K&R that praise because it's a sacred text and I'd feel guilty or embarressed to say otherwise. I said all that because that's how it worked for me: I bought the book, read the whole thing (in far less time and with far less effort than I expected), and at the end of it all I understood C.

I'm exaggerating, but only a little. I did read some more about C afterwards and I wouldn't claim to be a C master. But I never came across any new concepts once the book was complete, or had to fundamentally rework my existing understanding of any concepts. (Not like C++... Oh, there are templates that take templates as template parameters? Or, oh, rvalue references aren't any different to normal references once overload resolution has completed? etc.)

Yes I agree it caters for people that already have a fairly good understanding of coding.