Yep. It's not the best intro to C, for sure. I learned C when I was a teenager, from K&R C second edition, and several Amiga-specific books ("Amiga C for Beginners", for one.)
I'm not reading that whole thing right now (that is a lot of text), but I read as far as "What Is a Variable?" and nothing stands out as bad or AI-written. What problems do you see?
Indeed! I read through a couple of paragraphs. Each begins with a bloated introduction where each sentence repeats same idea many times in different words. Lot's of bullets repeating same statement. That's exactly how LLM scam looks like. The whole book is full of water. It can be reduced in size by a factor of 5.
Being LLM slop in particular, this book cost way more of my time than it should have. It really does look superficially competent, until you realize that competence is paragraph-to-paragraph, not section-to-section.
The scam is not stating up front "this was written by an LLM and I haven't read it." The dishonesty is claiming this book will teach you such-and-such when the author actually has no idea. It really is a scam. Even if he's not making anything directly, he's already earned 150 stars in the GitHub pseudoeconomy, plus good word-of-mouth from people who are lazy and thoughtless like he is, people who assumed that 4,500 pages about FreeBSD from a lead FreeBSD maintainer must be worth something and didn't bother to check if it was written by an LLM... even though it's 2026.
This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.
> This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.
I won't be that radical, the book still has value. There are many useful code samples with descriptions and explanations of concepts I did not know before. But to get to them one has to dig through a forrest of useless tokens. Someone has to pass it through an LLM and publish distilled edition. :-)
a) it's a good introduction to C
b) a human read any of it
https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte...
This book is a dishonest AI scam.