The thing about K&R is that it effectively communicates the hacker spirit to the student. When I went through K&R, I already had enough programming knowledge t

The thing about K&R is that it effectively communicates the hacker spirit to the student. When I went through K&R, I already had enough programming knowledge to "know" most of the problems he mentioned existed. K&R didn't try to show how to write the most correct, robust C function or program, but it did manage to get me to love C. C is a hard language to do much with. It takes hours to do in C what can be done in seconds in other languages. That's fine; it is intended to be an implementation language. The thing is, at the time the student is learning C, he normally is not ready to start implementing things. At Uni, we didn't start working on operating systems or programming languages for at least another year after the class that introduces the student to C. The thing that C does actually do well for a student is that it makes things much less mysterious. That, to me, is the the beauty behind K&R. It removes the mysteries of the standard libraries, and by the time I finished, I felt like I could start working on an operating system without feeling completely overwhelmed. Even though I never did, that practical knowledge has served me well when doing any kind of programming.