I agree that the tone of the blog post could have been less combative, but essentially all of this complaints are valid. Zed's does introduce things in the wrong order and in a very confusing fashion. The rant about C strings is also completely misguided and would lead a novice off course into using ugly thickets of macros and crappy frameworks rather than simply using C strings correctly. Any C function will misbehave if passed invalid input... and things like valgrind, which Zed is clearly well aware of, make C-style strings much less dangerous.

Zed also made many completely unjustified attacks on the K & R book, which is a well-written, easy to read book which introducse C concepts in a clear and readable way. Even if this was justified (and it's really, really not), that all belonged as a separate blog article rather than as part of an alleged "tutorial."

Finally Zed published a "rebuttal" to all of this in which he basically says that C sucks, is not worth learning, and he's learning Go. So the author quite reasonably asks, why would you want to learn C from someone who doesn't like the language or think it's worth learning?

I think we can all agree that Go (or some other high level language) probably is the better choice for most projects. But after all, there are still many places where C will continue to be used like the Linux kernel. Those people would be much better off reading K&R, as old as it is, than anything Zed has written. And his attacks on the K&R authors are just sad.