1. Buy K&R.
2. Read it. Maybe 2 or 3 times during the process of reading it, I would go write a program to try what I had just learned. This was was around 1980, so trying a program meant walking across campus to a terminal. I could either head to the computing center and use a public terminal, or to the high energy physics building (where I had just started a work-study job programming and it required C). The former would mean competing for a free terminal--and annoying people if I was spending my time at the terminal mostly reading K&R instead of typing. The later meant sitting at a terminal next to a noisy minicomputer in a cold room.
When I got to the end of K&R, I was a C programmer in theory.
3. Start doing real work, using K&R as a reference.
Very quickly theory became aligned with reality, and I was then a C programmer in practice.
Nowadays, most programming books I find assume that I'm sitting eagerly at a computer as I read, and that I want to stop every three paragraphs and type in some code and run it, and then the book discusses what that code did with the author writing under the assumption that I have the output of the code on my screen.
I like the K&R way better.