How long to learn C? [closed]

Question

I'm a C# programmer and I'm sold on the benefits of learning C. I want to deepen my knowledge of the underlying OS and CPU, understand the pain of memory management that garbage collection encapsulates away and generally improve my high-level programs thanks to an appreciation of the low-level issues that the compiler is dealing with on my behalf.

My question is how long can I expect to spend learning the C language in order to gain these benefits?

Is a couple of weekends spent reading the K&R book from cover to cover sufficient, or do I need to schedule time to cut some code? Do I need to spend time delving into any libraries, or is an understanding of the first-order concepts in the language enough to improve my C# code?

To be clear, I don't intend to write any significant programs in C. My goal is more to learn from the language than to become an expert in the language.

Answer 1

C will take a week to learn, and a lifetime to master.

Answer 2

Reading a K&R book and not writing code is like reading a book on weapons and never actually shooting. Yes, you've read in a book, that it works this way, but you have never encountered the typical problems that arise while doing this. Without practice such "knowlegde" is worth very little.

Plan to spend 2-3 years slowly writing small programs for solving different tasks in C. This will count as real experince. C provides delayed gratification for your effort.

Answer 3

I'm not sure how long it takes to learn a language - it probably comes down to the individual. But I'm pretty confident you can't learn one without writing and debugging code in it.