I believe K&R is a wonderful introduction to C - "wonderful" as in "let's open the editor and try this". It's well written, simple, and you are left with the feeling that someone just gave you a Jedi weapon.

It took a while for us as a community to realize that such a Jedi weapon can easily slice your fingers off, because before the internet the worst that would happen is "it crashed again" but that was kind of normal.