Why, there's even a whole book on that: http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Implementations-Techniques-...
Like Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: Case Studies in Common Lisp and Joshua Bloch's Effective Java, it's one of those books which despite having a specific programming language in the title, is really about programming in general.
I've written entire macro-based systems similar to those recommended by the author here, and find them very useful. Void pointers are great where they can be used, but I love the efficiency and clarity of the generated code approach.
For instance, in a chapter on string atoms (symbols) --- a concept which virtually no C program in the world takes advantage of, despite the centrality of the concept to Lisp, Python, and Ruby --- and this is the first chapter in the book --- you were shocked by his use of a 43 byte string to hold a number string... because someone might be using that code on a 192 bit machine?
You missed the forest for the trees. If you don't want your code tainted by the number 43, don't write that code. The point of the book is how you structure your code, divide it into subsystems, and present coherent interfaces to the rest of your program.
Anyway, I appreciate your response. It's good try to appreciate what others see that I do not. Yes, if you ignore the details of the code and the explanations, there are some good parts. If you look _only_ at the big picture, it's probably a fine book. And I love his clearly prefixed naming conventions. But I think you'd do a lot better reading something like the SQLite source code rather than this book if you want to see examples of good C.
I guess I have to ask: do you feel that chapter 4 on using setjmp() and longjmp() plus some brittle macros for error handling is also good for learners? I thought it was technically very clear but about 40 years out of date as to good practice. Is this a forest or a tree?