this is a very good point. my own experience writing C was basically that all the fancy terms in the book didn't help me any, because they translated poorly to

this is a very good point. my own experience writing C was basically that all the fancy terms in the book didn't help me any, because they translated poorly to tacit knowledge. what helped me was running into the problems myself, coming up with the solution myself, and then realizing someone had already done it. I'm very slow at tacit acquisition though. I needed more practice. For someone like me in the first year and a half, I would just give them the info. However, now that I have 3 years of C and C#, I can rapidly digest new design paradigms, and write much better code. If the guy purported to have 5-10 years of experience and is still writing crap, I would take issue with telling him the problems himself as he's probably one of those rote-memorization dudes that China or India pumps out with no tacit understanding.