The book is intended as a very first introduction into computer science and programming. As such, its content is well-balanced in comprehensiveness and conciseness. A programming book should not distract with verbose text and this book strikes a good middle ground between the mutually contradicting requirements to explain unintuitive new concepts to novices and keeping the path to experiential proficiency short.

The topic of programming in the C language is vast, and the content selection represents a carefully selected minimal set of chapters which is both manageable for first-time programmers and a good basis for further growth. The topics and narrative are true to the title, with the author anticipating the usual suspects of tough concepts to teach the reader just in time. Importantly, the original book (The C++ Version) lacks exercises. The translator has added a very good set of exercises to the end of each chapter, an important contribution.

About the Authors

• Allen B. Downey is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. He has written several books, including Computational Modeling and Complexity Science, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, The Little Book of Semaphores, Physical Modeling in MATLAB, and Learning Perl the Hard Way, etc.

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