Well, at this point, I don’t even know what to learn for getting an entry level CS job…so C is it. Reached chapter 17 of K.N.King’s C99, maybe read a little bit of C2x and C2y specifications, then I’ll probably start reading John Calcote’s Autotools and then metalanguage99. And I bet they won’t help me for my early career in any way or form.
I think learning and working with C was worth it for me. I however don’t still use it regularly (except in-so-far that I use C++ regularly, but they aren’t really comparable). I also didn’t start with it, but in retrospect when I finally did start learning C and using it in real projects, I’d say it was one of the times I significantly “leveled up” in my career.
Its usefulness really depends on where you are already at, though. For example, I was already fairly proficient in other more abstracted languages like C#, and some scripting languages. But those don’t really give you a solid understanding of how things work on a low level, how they are implemented, what makes things go fast (or slow). I had no idea what a “pointer” was or what they are used for, for example, until I learned C. Stripping away all the abstractions that other languages offer you forces you to have to understand the basics and think about things in a different way than you otherwise would be allowed to.