If you're serious about programming in C you'll read multiple books anyway. LCTHW seems like a good starting point to me. It's probably not for everyone. No book I've ever read about anything is. But it gets you to from passive reading to actively playing around fast. And it doesn't throw just code in front of you. It also explains the most basic functions of some of the non OS specific tools you will actually use when you'll be doing serious stuff much later. You can build on that pretty well, because you now know more about what you don't know, which gives you a tremendous advantage in terms of further research.