I'm learning C on my own time. I'm going at a pretty fast pace, but I'm highlighting most of the important things or at least, what I think is important so I can refer back to it later. I struggle with most of the back of the chapter exercises mainly because I'm going through it really fast and most of the time, I have to end up looking at the solutions.

How much of C do you have to know before you start programming microcontrollers for basic circuits needs such as controlling the elements in a circuit, motors, etc... Not too advanced programming stuff, but stuff that requires programming.

I'm like 3/4 of the way through the book and I can see where some of this would apply, but if I were given a microcontroller and told to program it so it would behave (control a circuit) a certain way, I wouldn't even know where to start.