201–208 of 208 posts
+1 to the non-existent poll entry that says: "I know C thoroughly, though I barely ever use it these days. I used it for so long and during such a formative period of my overall programming career that I can read/write C code with virtually no spin-up time even though I find myself touching C code very rarely. Oh, and btw, when I find myself coding C on a nix box, I am still amused at how I have muscle memory for all…
Dumb question: Is the 2nd Edition K&R for about $50 on Amazon worth the coin over the 1st Edition I recently picked up at a thrift store for a buck? (I also picked up Steele's C: A Reference Manual , 4th Ed. for a buck at the same place.)
Nope, the first edition gives the nice approach and if you want anything with more depth than the reference manual, you might as well go a get a copy of e.g. the C99 standard itself.
I wish more languages had books equivalent to K&R. Here's how I learned C. 1. Buy K&R. 2. Read it. Maybe 2 or 3 times during the process of reading it, I would go write a program to try what I had just learned. This was was around 1980, so trying a program meant walking across campus to a terminal. I could either head to the computing center and use a public terminal, or to the high energy physics building (where I h…
here is a link to the book tzs is talking about, for those who are interested http://ifile.it/vo6ezb
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent more than a decade (from the age of about 10) learning to program from a wide variety of books, about a variety of languages. I'd written software in Basic, Pascal, C, Amiga E, ARexx, and assembly. It wasn't until I read K&R in my mid-20s that it all actually started making sense (especially C, but everything made more sense after K&R). Up to that point, I'd been copy-paste programming, imitating, etc. K&R is…
Amiga E was one of the first programming languages I tried to learn. I had started with Apple BASIC, and happened to get a free Amiga E compiler and booklet on some Amiga magazine. The booklet left a lot to be desired; specifically, it showed how to do output but not input, and as a clueless novice BASIC programmer, I naively assumed that Amiga E could not do input. I did not write much of interest using Amiga E, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen, brother. Like being a contractor with a high rate who gets to program all day and ignore the political bullshit.
As someone who has been a "contractor who ignores all the political bullshit", my personal observation is that it is the contractors who are actually good at navigating the political bullshit (win friends and influence people and all that jazz) tend to be the ones who get top dollar and have continuous employment. Whereas the contractors who are merely extraordinarily good at programming tend to have a lot of downtim…