I started reading this book too and am half way through it. It's very nice approach. The author also want you to learn other tools that will help with making your life easier (Make, Valgrind). Also at the end of every chapters, he will ask you to break the program then ask why that was the case. Also pushes you toward learning how to read the man page. Later chapters, he stopped explaining what the program do. He expect you to research it from man pages. Give it a try, you will like it. If you have some back ground in programming you can probably go through this book real quick.