Thanks for the code review of my last 23 years of work on C projects. Nice ego that your book must be the only way to learn this.

I mostly disagree with your statement about "most good C code" not using stdlib strings/apis.

To be fair, from your comments here, it looks like you aren't really saying that -- you are saying we have to be careful when using them. This I know, and carefully guard against, and I do try to break my code regularly. But to assert that "most good C code" doesn't use them fails to meet with my experience.

That said, _all_ bad C code (ab)uses them, probably due to carelessness and/or misunderstanding of how things work in C.