The book is not just about C. It'll teach you to become an over-all better programmer and give you a better understanding of computer science. You'll learn about things like testing, debugging, and sorting algorithms.
Learn C The Hard Way states in the preface that it is not for first-time programmers. If you don't have any background with programming, they suggest you start with Learn Python The Hard Way.
Some readers suggest that this book is better suited for developers with at least some experience in C.
This book is so well known that it's affectionately called "K & R", after the authors.
It's been cited in many other books and is familiar to most, if not all, CS students.
The challenges at the end of each chapter do a great job of requiring many of the skills learned up to that point. Completing the challenges is a great way of insuring you understand the material.
The K&R style works for old Unix mainframe command-line programs that exit after a simple task and leave the cleanup to the OS; where input is only from trusted experts; and most functions are only called internally to the program. The environment is very different today. This style will get your server owned by hackers, or crash it due to a memory leak, etc. You will have to unlearn what you've learned from this book to use C correctly in the real world today.
The book really challenges you to think like a programmer by constantly asking questions that force you to solve problems, rather than telling you how to solve the problem and only asking you to write the syntax.
The instructors are very enthusiastic and extremely knowledgeable.
The main professor uses a variety of fun examples to demonstrate points, often making for exciting and funny lectures.
CS50x is the actual Harvard course turned into a MOOC, with the lectures filmed from the actual Harvard course. The problem sets are all the same as well.
This has resulted in the quality of the course being extremely high.
The reason the time demand for the course is so great is because of how in-depth it is.
CS50 has you programming in C right from the start. Computer Science concepts, such as runtime analysis and data structures, are also taught very early on and applied in projects.
Along with C, this course will also introduce you to web development (JavaScript and PHP).
The course is very fast-paced. Weekly suggested readings are usually a couple of chapters from two different text books, there are hours of videos each week, plus problem sets that often take a beginner many hours to complete.
In order to keep up with the course, you have to be prepared to put in a lot of hours.
There are 32 chapters in the book, which is 352 pages long.
The short chapters make it extremely easy to use this book as a reference, and breaks everything down into small pieces that are easy to digest.
This book, as the title suggests, is really aimed at people with no prior programming experience.
Fundamentals are gone through in detail (such as loops, variables etc.), which would be quite a slow review for someone with experience in another language.