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Hello,
Believe me, it's the best time to start your preparation for civil service! You have 2 and half years to study. If you plan properly, you can clear UPSE in your first attempt. It doesn't matter, what degree you are doing. It's your dedication towards the goal reaches you to the goal.I will explain, what I will do if I am in your situation.
1. First I analyse myself about, why I want to become civil servant (15 days). By the end of 15 days, I will have my goals after becoming civil servant.
2. As a second step I go through the detailed syllabus of the 3 rounds of the exam (1-2 weeks).
3. My third step will be clearly analyse the question papers and understand, what I have to focus more and what not (1- 2 months).
It's a very important step.
4. Then I will start reading Hindu newspaper almost 1 hour / day. Remaining time I'll spend with NCERT books. I will also start spending my weekends in some of nice websites and magazines for UPSE (6 months).
Oh. Don't you have time to do all these? Come on! Many people including me do all these while working and student life is much better than working. Still you will be having more than 1.5 years.
5. Now you'll be comfortable with basics. This is your second phase of studies. Go through the blogs of toppers. You'll come to know, what reference books you have to study. Prepare those.

If you already have programming experience in other languages and really want to understand how C works, skip to the next paragraph. Rather than a book, I'd recommend starting with this online tutorial: C Tutorial - Learn C - Cprogramming. Com. It's pretty good at teaching the basics. Then make your own small project using what you've learned - something that shows your knowledge of the concepts, but won't take you weeks to make. Maybe a card game, like solitaire or war, which prints to the console. Then, when you really want to understand what C is doing to your code, continue to the next paragraph. C is an interesting language, because you can't truly understand it without understanding exactly how a computer works. To this end, I recommend "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective". This book teaches C from the bottom up, starting with the processor and working its way up through assembly code to the C code that represents it. It teaches you to see C code as a thin layer over assembly, and helps you to understand why things like caching and out-of-order memory access can affect your programme. Unfortunately, this book is used as a textbook in many courses, and as a result is highly overpriced. Google searches may be able to turn up alternative copies. I have the second edition, which is very good and probably all you need. The newer third edition covers the x64 instruction set in more detail. If you want to focus on x64 programs, it may be worth the extra cost to get that version.