Why I learned C "Category-0" Style
I've been asked a few times over the years why I chose to learn C with the colloquially-known "K&R C Bible", and specifically the Category-0 style, coined on USENET back in the day.
For those unfamiliar, I'm talking about The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed.,
by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of the language. In it are
a series of exercises that the reader can work on to build their knowledge of
C through actually building something with it. On comp.lang.c, people would
share their solutions to exercises in this book. After a while, they coined
different categories of solutions, to refer to their robustness and complexity.
Category-0 is solving each exercise using only the knowledge the book gives you, up to that point. In other words, it's to approach it as a complete newbie and see what you can put together using only the stuff you've learned in the book.