Teach yourself C in 24 hours

What Hacker News says

1. zubairqJan 2024
   I remember reading a "Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours / 21 days" type book on a bus trip in the 1990s and learning C++ that way! It was a great start!
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2. vel0cityJun 2023
   When I was a teenager first learning the basics of coding, I usually found programming books that focused on actually making things to be the best tools for learning. Books like "Beginning C++ through Game Programming" and "Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours" were way more engaging and picking apart the code samples probably taught me more than what most of my peers did in the intro to CS class in college.

   When you can actually see the changes to things and have a real interesting project to work on its way more engaging that just going over the theory of things. Obviously, one should follow up with actually learning the theory as well to get a deeper understanding, but I often just can't grok things unless I can play with them.

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3. martttSep 2020
   "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" by Tony Zhang (1997) seems interesting as well:

   http://aelinik.free.fr/c/

   A previous HN discussion on that book:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624521

   EDIT: That earlier discussion has an excellent first post. Quoting:

   "It bothers me so much that very few books (Kernighan) talk about WHY. WHY. WHY is a variable needed? WHY is a function needed? WHY do we use OOP? Every single book out there jumps straight into explaining objects, how to create them, constructors, blah blah blah. No one fricking talks about what's the point of all this?

   Teaching syntax is like muscle memory for learning Guitar. It is trivial and simply takes time. Syntax - everyone can learn and it is only one part of learning how to code. Concepts are explained on their own without building upon it.

   [... A list with learning resources the poster finds great ...]

   This is learning how to produce music. Not learning the F chord. Teaching how to code is fundamentally broken and very few books/courses do it well."

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4. blibbleFeb 2026
   indeed

   building a working C compiler from scratch is literally in my "teach yourself C in 24 hours" book from 30 years ago

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5. tptacekJan 2026
   HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK!

   But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.

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6. SL61Jul 2025
   Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.

   My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.

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