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I was brought up on K&R. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone anymore. Much like a Java certification, most of it will have to be unlearned in real life. It's lit
by kryten 13y ago
I was brought up on K&R. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone anymore. Much like a Java certification, most of it will have to be unlearned in real life. It's littered with holes and land mines and misses a massive chunk of the surrounding tooling and all the idioms which make for a good C program that won't kill you or your immediate successor who has to maintain what you've written.
I'd go with Zed's Learn C The Hard Way, then 21st Century C and go from there.
- Keyframe 13y agoZed made a really good intro to C. I was surprised. My only issue with it was he introduced readers to bstring instead of something UTF, but still better than vanilla chars. I wouldn't even know an UTF library for C with permissive license and lightweight on top of my head. C coding is all about memory management and data structures layout.
- kryten 13y agoAgree but Unicode is a rather complicated diversion. In a lot of circumstances it's not really required as well. It's definitely a reading on subject. Also, bstr stops a lot of simple tasks looking impossible and therefore motivates people. Further to that, if you consider Java, Python, C# etc, you're using massive libraries at a very high abstraction level and it is considered normal. There isn't anything built into C like that.
- Keyframe 13y agoI agree completely with you on all counts. He didn't made a wrong choice with bstrlib by far. I just felt there was a strong movement in recent years to move towards utf in general, so why not expose beginners to it as well, just as a part of overall strategy. It's not a trivial issue to tackle though for sure.