Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
1–10 of 178 posts
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#2From the creator of the famous Network programming in C guide.
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#3Nice. But is there any like-this guide in Rust?
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#4Thank you for posting!
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#5Nice. But is there any like-this guide in Rust?
The Rust Programming Language[0] is the officially endorsed guide. I thought it was a good starting point.
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#6IMO, pointers are less difficult to comprehend than other abstractions, like lambdas are.
If you know how to walk down a street and stop at the right street number, then you have used pointers. And if you've ever observed that one tall building may "cover" a range of street numbers, such as 200-220, then you should understand how to move from one 4-byte "value" to the next in an array in memory.
Anyway, many more analogies... probably better than this one.
Maybe unions could make using pointers a bit more challenging, but again, tall buildings next to short buildings and so on. We do this kind of pointer calculation in real life.
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#7I've enjoyed this guide a number of times but each time I hit a brick wall trying to understand pointers. I'm still keen to learn but it just doesnt 'click' for me...
Edit: poor grammar
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#8I've enjoyed this guide a number of times but each time I hit a brick wall trying to understand pointers. I'm still keen to learn but it just doesnt 'click' for me... Edit: poor grammar
One analogy I’ve used to teach pointers is to think of them as phone numbers. They’re an identifier used to get ahold of something that you might not otherwise know exactly where it is. If you call my number, I’ll pick up. But if I transfer my number to someone else, that doesn’t mean anything happened to me personally. That number is just not pointing to new anymore.
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#9I've enjoyed this guide a number of times but each time I hit a brick wall trying to understand pointers. I'm still keen to learn but it just doesnt 'click' for me... Edit: poor grammar
That is fascinating, thanks for sharing. What part of pointers is it that makes it so hard for you to grasp, if you have any thoughts?
Do you have any experience in other programming languages? How familiar are you with low-level computer architecture, at the CPU/memory level?
I guess one important part is to realize that in C, variables are basically names for memory locations, that in turn hold values. In other languages variables can be more abstract, and you have no idea how the value(s) are being associated with the variable name.
I started writing an example here, but I ran out of time and it wasn't good enough. :) Sorry.
EDIT: Now I've taken a loo at the relevant pages in the guide itself, and it seemed to explain the concepts very clearly and easily, so ... I'm not sure how to help. :)
Re: Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf]
#10I've enjoyed this guide a number of times but each time I hit a brick wall trying to understand pointers. I'm still keen to learn but it just doesnt 'click' for me... Edit: poor grammar
Try to explain where you're stuck.