Lost Arts of Programming

I can't believe this, nobody at my school, not even the hard-core gamers and hackers at my school, knows what the hell the "C" language is. They call themselves hackers? I wish that we didn't lose our roots when we start programming. I program almost exclusively in C, not C++; firstly because running unoptimized C++ code on my machine is a memory hog and processor cycle sucker, secondly because even unoptimized C code is amazingly fast and small. I can see why Linux's C based Kernel is a hellova lot faster than Windows' C++ OS. Unless C++ gets more heavily reformed and becomes more powerful than C at less of a price, I'm sticking with C.
A great C reference book is, you're going to hate me for this, C All-in-One-Desk-Reference for Dummies by Dan Gookin.