Comment by hunter-gatherer

Springer press has a book "Programming for Engineers and Scientists" or something like that, which is the first book I picked up to "self teach CS". From the get go pointers are involved and explained in this linear memory model and explained how they work on the stack and what not. I always thought this was the best approach; the reality is taught first, the abstraction (syntax) second. Not sure why so many programming books do it the other way.