When comparing The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) vs C Programming Absolute Beginner's Guide, the Slant community recommends The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) for most people. In the question“What are the best resources for a beginner to learn C?” The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) is ranked 2nd while C Programming Absolute Beginner's Guide is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) is:
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.
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Pros
Pro Well known classic
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.
Pro It's excerpted from the idea of its creators
This book is written by Dennis Ritchie, who was one of the main people behind the development and design of C and UNIX.
Pro Creative, challenging exercises
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.
Pro This book set the template for programming language books
Pro Short chapters
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.
Cons
Con Out of Date
Some commands and practices are out of date, so errata and googling is needed while going through the book.
Con Teaches bad style
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.
Con Not for beginners
Assumes familiarity not only with programming concepts but some C language specifics.
Con Slow for someone with prior experience
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.