3 ms·

To be honest I learned from K&R but I guess it's too outdated and not really about "modern C". But of those resources one of them seemed quite fun and probably

by nnq 10y ago

To be honest I learned from K&R but I guess it's too outdated and not really about "modern C". But of those resources one of them seemed quite fun and probably harmless ([0]) and the other one ([1]) pretty practical and "bad style" but error-free as far as I read through it, with the added benefit of teaching newbs that tools matter a lot and getting them pretty fast into using make, valgrind etc.... In your opinion, what would be: 1. the modern equivalent of K&R? 2. a solid reference to keep around and consult afterwards? (with 1 and only 1 answer to the questions above, please, not a list, 'cause every time I search "learn c" I get over lists upon lists, of high quality comments - which is bad because you can't actually dismiss them as rubish, you actually have to read them -, that only throw you into paralysis by analysis, so you just say, "fuck it, just grab K&R or LCTHW, then grab a C open source project you feel like hacking on and start banging you head on it"...)

fredmorcos 10y ago
1. For "modern C" it would be K&R, then learn Haskell; especially take note of its type system and how you can apply what you learn there in C. 2. The C standard draft, your compiler(s') manual and man pages if you're on POSIX. Also pencil and paper for drawing your arrays. Clarification about 1: Haskell has good solutions to a lot of problems that have plagued programming, learn them because they are not language-specific but are mindset-specific. The advantage is that once your mindset changes, you start paying attention to off-by-one errors and potential overflows and overruns. You also start paying attention to using the correct types in a C program and you start taking advantage of enums to reduce the space of possible states in each function in your program. Once this clicks, memory management is a breeze. Also learn the mindset of solving the problem at hand and nothing but the problem at hand. C is not a language for creating abstractions everywhere, it's a language for writing down as little steps as possible to solve that specific problem.

by nnq 10y ago

fredmorcos 10y ago

1. For "modern C" it would be K&R, then learn Haskell; especially take note of its type system and how you can apply what you learn there in C. 2. The C standard draft, your compiler(s') manual and man pages if you're on POSIX. Also pencil and paper for drawing your arrays. Clarification about 1: Haskell has good solutions to a lot of problems that have plagued programming, learn them because they are not language-specific but are mindset-specific. The advantage is that once your mindset changes, you start paying attention to off-by-one errors and potential overflows and overruns. You also start paying attention to using the correct types in a C program and you start taking advantage of enums to reduce the space of possible states in each function in your program. Once this clicks, memory management is a breeze. Also learn the mindset of solving the problem at hand and nothing but the problem at hand. C is not a language for creating abstractions everywhere, it's a language for writing down as little steps as possible to solve that specific problem.