Listening to you, I'm thinking about just reading the C books and nothing more. If C's usefulness to non-C-programmers is simply that it gives them greater understanding of how computers work, then reading might suffice.
K&R gives you a very good, clear and detailed explanation of the topic at hand and then immediately gives you several exercises to practice it. If you don't do the exercises the information will just fall out of your short-term memory whereas if you actually do them your long-term memory will get engaged as well as general muscle-memory for C coding.