Heads up to other people attempting this lesson: I just spent more time than necessary tracking down why the code examples in the book don't seem to work (Ubuntu 10.10, GCC 4.4.3).
An explanation of why:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1798511/how-to-avoid-press-enter-with-any-getchar
TLDR: Input is buffered, getchar() will see all of your characters at once. Likely more examples from the book won't work "out of the book", so don't get discouraged.
Will edit to post finished code later.