Ugh, while I 100% agree that learning C (or similar lower level language) should be a prereq for any programming job, the use of the K&R C book is idiomatic of what is wrong with C. To many people pick up that book and try to emulate what they read.
I firmly believe that book will teach you every bad habit you should never use in actual practice. 30 years ago, many of those "tricks" made sense given the compilers and computers of the time, but today your much better just writing straight clean C (for example using array indexes instead of pointers). Not only because its more maintainable, but because it often generates more efficient code due to hardware support for base+displacement addressing and compilers abilities to understand the intent and optimize the resulting code. Furthermore, code like what you find in that book is what has given C a bad name due to buffer overflows and the dozens of other things people think are the fault of "C" rather than the programming environment around it. Not the least of which is a formatting scheme that hides bugs.
So, PLEASE, if you are learning C, stay as far away from the K&R book as you can until you have gained enough proficiency to understand the pitfalls of may of the techniques taught in that book.
I firmly believe that book will teach you every bad habit you should never use in actual practice. 30 years ago, many of those "tricks" made sense given the compilers and computers of the time, but today your much better just writing straight clean C (for example using array indexes instead of pointers). Not only because its more maintainable, but because it often generates more efficient code due to hardware support for base+displacement addressing and compilers abilities to understand the intent and optimize the resulting code. Furthermore, code like what you find in that book is what has given C a bad name due to buffer overflows and the dozens of other things people think are the fault of "C" rather than the programming environment around it. Not the least of which is a formatting scheme that hides bugs.
So, PLEASE, if you are learning C, stay as far away from the K&R book as you can until you have gained enough proficiency to understand the pitfalls of may of the techniques taught in that book.