Not recommended.

In keeping with the Brain Teasers/Puzzlers format, each chapter of this book contains a short (less than half a page) program and the reader is invited to guess what it does before flipping the page and looking at the author’s explanation (which takes up less than two pages in most cases) and some references for further reading. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find a reason to recommend this incarnation of the model.

The book kicks off with a question about the printf format specifiers and then erroneously claims that the ‘width’ part of the %[width][.precision]f specifier applies only to the integer part. It continues in the next chapter with the claim that 5/4 evaluates to 0 because 5 is not divisible by 4. About a third of the remaining 23 chapters also contain errors, though less egregious than the opening salvo. I also know for a fact that some of the mistakes were pointed out to the author during the beta process, but they all remain uncorrected in the final version.

I don’t particularly like the author’s obvious disdain for mathematics either. It could be interpreted as an attempt to be humorous and written off as a matter of taste, but trivial errors, such as repeatedly mixing up the base and the power in exponentiations, seem to indicate genuine ignorance instead.

Overall, perhaps the only good use of this volume would be training material for aspiring technical reviewers and proofreaders of C programming books, which is a very niche market indeed.

Website: https://pragprog.com/titles/cbrain/c-brain-teasers/