I've worked with Java and C++ for several years, but I need to learn C for a project I'm doing this summer. Having heard many good things about K&R2, I picked it up and I'm astounded at the clarity of the piece.

By today's standards, it does have a few fairly academic examples (if I wanted to convert fahrenheit to celsius, I would use google), but otherwise it has excellent examples of functional code written in a concise style to clearly demonstrate how to use the language to get things done.

The author mainly seems to be implying that K&R2 is "totally not related to what [the author is] doing right now as a programmer in some company."

Agreed. K&R is one of the best teaching texts I've ever read. It's paced wonderfully, and explained extremely clearly. I had tried numerous other C texts before getting K&R, and never managed to get very far...pointers, in particular, seem to be very poorly covered by everybody else.