kierl

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Back in, well, I don't really remember how long a go it was but a while ago, I was at Software Etc. and was looking through the books and resources for learning programming. My ultimate goal was to master the C++ language but every book I saw assumed that you had at least a basic understanding of C. At this point I didn't even have a basic understanding of HTML... :P Anyhow, I found one that looked pretty good, Macmillain Publishing's C Starter Kit. Provided me with a book - TYC24 - and a CD.
The book was pretty straight forward, and learning the C basics was a snap. I think I went through the book in about a week. It's author, Tony Zhang, however, used M$ Visual C++ exculsively however and as such I had to convert every IDE/Compiler command I was taught from VC++ to Borland C++(I wasn't using Linux at the time)
The book, being a beginning C book, didn't even begin to ecroach on the topics of graphical programming, in fact everything from the book had to be compiled as DOS or EasyWin, however, I found that after working through this book, I could read, debug, and figure out infinitely more complex programs than I had ever encoutered during the course of the book. Provided that it was written in C. Within two weeks I was building a voxel engine that ran in DOS(This was back when Win95 was new and DirectX sucked big time) And had coded a cool new animated spash screen for my computer(Which booted into DOS not W95).
The CD that came in the kit contained an Advanced C book(PDF), a C FAQ, and a beginning C++ book as well but I never really got too involved in those. Mainly because my nephew got ahold of the CD and trashed it.
Anyhow, This book gave me a great base for programming and, although I never went on to really learn C++, It has helped me extensively, from coding simple CGI apps to giving me a great basic understanding for learning JavaScript, PHP, etc...
I guess my only real complaint is that it isn't really IDE/Compiler specific(yeah he goes through his commands in VC++ somewhat but tries to cut down on that so as not to confuse people using other compilers) so in order to even get started you have to read up pretty extensively on your compiler... Which is hard to do if you don't know the first thing about programming... Unless of course you use VC++...
I would say that this book is worth it... if it cost less... but as it is it's not really worth a whole lot as everything in the book can be gleaned from the internet... And most internet resources tell you how to work with their favorite compiler as well...