Peer-reviewed academic books and papers can be inaccurate and/or biased in some way. (Hopefully ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-review#Criticisms_of_peer_... ) less so than Wikipedia.) That doesn't mean they should be 'banned', only that there is no way to avoid critical, reflective reading whenever it matters to you that the information and arguments you are putting together are right.
Why do people (sci-fi writers and scientists alike) generally seem to assume that extra-terrestrial life would be Earth-like life in Earth-like conditions?
I found this http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/cclass.html a useful, lighter, accompaniment to K&R when first learning C. Good luck. C is a great language for, er, implementing higher-level languages in ;-.
Acorn BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum. BASIC. Various Usbourne books. I wrote a text editor on my Spectrum in BASIC. It was too slow at keeping up with your typing, so I figured out enough about Z80 assembly to write a little routine to speed up the slow bit.
Later I made a sort of GUI front-end for my Spectrum, inspired by the Macs at school.