Working my way through it now, in my efforts to re-learn C. Besides the treatment of modern standard C, I like that it treats the C development and distribution environment as a first class subject.

This looks like a great resource. Interesting that the author says this book is partly for "application devs".

As a JavaScript dev, learning C has always had a certain appeal. However, anytime I start to dive in, there's this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I'm wasting my time as I will never use what I'm learning.

To any devs coming from higher level languages, have you found learning C useful in any practical sense? Or has your exploration of C been more "for fun"?

Yeah I really liked 21st Century C as well.

Just a FYI for anyone looking to get it - make sure you get the latest edition (currently 2nd edition) as the first had a lot of issues which they fixed in the 2nd edition thanks to good feedback.

I liked comment about manual memory management ("This memory model is why Jesus weeps when he has to code in C") and on page 151 in features table "Jesus weeps", made me smile.

I just read it myself. For someone new to C, it was great to find a concise source of info on things in the modern C ecosystem and toolchain. For example, I appreciated the chapters on Autotools and Python bindings. Of course this info is available elsewhere, but it's great to have a short guide that covers the basics.

One warning on the Python chapter, though. It is Python 2. But, it was a nice intro and got me reading the Python3 C API docs to see what changed.