I already bought Oualline's book, for now that will keep me busy. I was considering K&R and the only reason I decided to go with Practical C Programming is its wider scope. I'm not talking here about the C language itself but but things like advice on style or real-life examples (statistics releated program). There's as well discussion of a life cycle of a software - from idea, through specification and actual coding, to release and maintenance.

Those things are very helpful for someone who's experience of source code is occasional patching or make install. I want to approach K&R after I will gain at least basic understanding of the whole 'programming' thing.

As I understood your post, you expect some super-duper book that will get you straight to the cool stuff (although you also picked a wrong lang if that's your goal) without much previous knowledge. If I maybe misunderstood, feel free to point it out.

I picked up C to start with is because its rawness and not hidding things from the programmer. For example, pointers, of which i just have a less than faint idea. By real word project I meant small cli utilities performing useful tasks, nothing more.

You're correct, I don't know enough about C to call any book "outdated". My reasoning was introduction of C11 but then again, I don't know how much it changed the language itself.

Would you recommed Ouailline's book as a good starting point?

If you are bit more skilled and have some experience with *nix, then I would say go for either Debian or Arch. Arch is lightweight and can be customized to your precise needs, but it can be kind of a hassle to install and will definitely take some time configuring things. Also, arch has a pretty awesome forums/wiki that can help you a ton when you get issues.

As well: plethora of packages and helpful folks on #archlinux / mailing list. Currently I'm running it on Dell Precision M70 and it's blazingly fast. As zombie said, Arch might be a hassle at times but what you learn solving those occasional problems definitely won't hurt you.