It is "bad" if one hunk fails, as this means a patch hasn't been applied completely. Which in turn means the source is modified partly and most probably broken.
For programming, I suggest you to just search the web and pick the guide that suits you best. As book I'd suggest "The C programming language" by Kernighan & Ritchie (but it's quite hard to read for a beginner). O'Reilly has some other nice books on that too.