Maybe the book I read was not that good (Deitel&Deitel) but the section on macros was pretty tiny and I don't think I'd have understood that macro on my own. Anyways, I think C is great, just that most books don't seem to cover the important stuff to work on serious C projects.
The macro isn't the complicated part in the OP (`e` just gets substituted with whatever the argument is). The definition the macro generates is (for most cases, needlessly) complicated, but that has nothing to do with macros or the preprocessor.
The general rules of macros are:
1. Don't use them; prefer static functions.
2. Use them as symbolic constants only.
3. Use parameterized macros only when you must use # or ## (i.e., for code abstraction), and then use them sparingly.
4. If you really insist, wrap every use of the arguments in parentheses, and be careful not to write the name of an argument somewhere where you don't mean it.
You'll get pretty far knowing next to nothing about macros (e.g. expansion phases and tokenization rules) by following the above rules.
Deitel&Deitel make some amazing books as far as I'm concerned. They were my source material through college and a very enjoyable introduction to C, C++, and Java.
