The man who moved my book into the "avoided" category admitted to me in an email that he did it just because of my K&R critique, not because of the book's quality, is not a C programmer, hasn't coded C professionally ever, and works doing PHP with almost no C experience.

It is shocking to me that someone who doesn't even use C is handing out critiques of any book focused on C.

Yeah I am not picking sides here but they really sold me against your book on freenode. As a newbie I didn't know any better. Come to think of it, I was doing just fine following your book, until I went on #C at freenode.

The critique of ZedShaw's book appears to be

> Too many factual problems and a presentation that gets you to do things wrongly before being shown how to do it correctly, and not even always then.

Eh?? Isn't that the whole point of "Learn __ the Hard Way"? ie., by making mistakes and learning from them?

Also, K&R does many things the wrong way for expediency. It's fine if you know that already, but newbies do not know that.

The main critique of Zed seems to be that he didn't say it was impossible to protect a C function from the caller. So what? There is a big difference between his suggested style and the style you'd get from an uncritical reading of K&R, even though neither is 100% safe from the caller.