For those of you undecided about this book keep in mind that for some reason Amazon.com has decided to keep outdated comments posted on earlier editions of this item. This edition of the textbook was published on July 15 2006. There is only one comment that was posted after the date of release of this book. Why Amazon.com has kept the outdated comments I don't know. I do know that authors normally attempt to improve upon their work when publishing new editions - usually based on direct feedback from users, and also in the case of this subject to make the reader aware of techniques based on newer technology. So before making a decision to buy or not to buy this book, discount all the outdated comments posted here....they were made on older editions and don't reflect the improvements made on the newer material.

This is a very good book for a person that has no idea what they are doing in program coding. It starts out very simple, and although the code is written for unix, it still is pretty much the same for windows compilers.

Complaits about the verbosity of this problem solving wonder are not waranted, unless they have read the book from cover-to-cover. Top-down design with functions is the primary programming paradigm inherent in C's structured procedural setup. Selection structure and repetition/loop statements are next discussed. Modular programming - followed by data types and arrays - is central to getting real systems up and running in C. Passing input/output and arguments is easy...that is until pointers come along. Strings aren't as daunting as made out to be; longer sting concatenation and conversions to numbers are the lone murky area of string processing. Mathematical recursion is the idea of fracturing whole ideas and problems into component solutions, then repeating elementary algorithms as many times necessary to derive the desired output or variable storage. Structures and union types are a little sketchy, and are probably better presented in Deitels introduction to C. Text and binary file processing is simple, just be prepared for 'flags' and 'EOFs' (end of files). Queueing a linked list and database programming and the accompanying source code is available in later chapters. All in all, 700+ pages leave much to be desired in terms of ANSI C libraries and pointer arithmetic; character sets settle themselves. Four stars because of the solid intro writing - would have rated five-star had it given several large real-world systems to program.

I found this book to be rather elliptical in its description of fundamental aspects of C. As a beginner, I was mainly looking for instruction on how to do some particular task. Hanly and Koffman strive to place simple ideas in larger contexts. Clearly this is a defensible approach. Once I understood what was going on (frequently from other sources), I was able to read the book with some degree of appreciation. However, I still believe that this book is not a suitable introduction to C, at least not for a novice programmer. Its verbosity finally becomes too frustrating. I have one other complaint: How can the publisher charge so much money for a paperback?

I have had a previous C class to the one that I am going through currently. While several of the topics seem to be well organized, there are important topics such as pointers that are poorly treated. Instead of devoting a chapter to pointers the author has scattered them over several chapters without an organized effort to insure the reader of this book understands this important subject. Even my instructor expressed his dismay at the poor treatment of pointers.

There is the other problem of inadaquate explainations though out the book. As a student, this is not helpfull when I am trying to learn C.

I do hope that the fifth edition will better organized. If it weren't for the college class requireing this book I would be more dis-pleased than I am. Are you are looking for a book to learn C from? My advise, look some where else.