The best book on C is Sams''s teach yourself C in 24 hours by tony zhang. It helps alot. I also have that book on my hardrive and it sucks!!!

I actually thought the Jesse Liberty book was quite good as a beginner''s guide I don''t think it was designed to teach you advanced topics, in the same way that if you bought a book called "Learn English in 21 days" you wouldn''t expect to be able to master Shakespeare with it.

If you have Visual C++ 5 or above, the documentation is actually pretty good, and worth browsing through. The books Mossmoss mentioned are great later on when you need to know how to do things well. You could always look for something like C++ for Dummies if you want good explanations. I don''t know about the quality of that book having only read the reference guide version though.