>>1It is like AVGN taking some Street Fighter 2010 and making fun of it. That is okay book for learning C, to make your first DOS program, especially if there are not many alternatives and C compilers are just beginning to appear, while people still write their software in assembly.
And the example is okay, it is shows that you shouldn't return pointers to stack. I hate when people nitpick irrelevant details, like the informal style of the book and attempt to make it accessible to wider auditory, not just computer scientists.