61–70 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People don't like K&R? I can understand it not being suitable for children and the very beginner, but it's one of a very few programming books that is useful, succinct, pragmatic, doesn't get bogged down in APIs, and is written clearly. (The companion book "Programming in the UNIX environment" is the get-you-started guide from the very beginning, although it assumes 1970s terminal defaults)
K&R is the best second C programming book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Programming is learned by writing programs" - Brain Kernighan And that is what anyone who goes through K&R will do: Reading and writing lots of real programs. A simple program is worth a thousand words! Which unfortunately the majority of technical books just can't get right. Explain the concepts in 5 full dull pages, and then at the end "Hey, checkout this little snippet of code, which by the way does nothing reall…
> A simple program is worth a thousand words! Whereas, the less said about complicated code, the better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Programming is learned by writing programs" - Brain Kernighan And that is what anyone who goes through K&R will do: Reading and writing lots of real programs. A simple program is worth a thousand words! Which unfortunately the majority of technical books just can't get right. Explain the concepts in 5 full dull pages, and then at the end "Hey, checkout this little snippet of code, which by the way does nothing reall…
I'd like to add some emphasis on reading . For a beginner, writing is obviously very very important as the way to get to the point where he can just sit down and solve a given task. But reading lots and lots of code (from many different sources) will help him pick up idioms and find common & good solutions to specific problems. Even for a smart person, I think it'll take a lot of time and effort to arrive to the clea…
It takes a large volume of work to really get into programming, and I think that reading is easier than writing, so it's a fast way to dig in (keeping in mind that feedback is critical - so reading without writing has severe diminishing returns)!
Install Valgrind. It makes error messages a lot less cryptic (my #1 problem with C... not that's it's limited to C). If you don't get proper feedback, it's not learning, just banging your head against the wall.
I've had a heck of a time getting Valgrind working on a mac (especially since Mavericks), hardly finding any resources about it. Is there an alternative, or do you have any advice on getting it to work?
This situation is why there is "hello world"; that program seems trivial but actually has important implications; for instance, that your environment works, that you know how to feed programs to the compiler, that you can actually run the output. I never took "hello world" seriously until I started doing embedded systems work; it's now an extraordinarily important tool for me (I work an anomalously weird number of di…
This situation is why there is "hello world"; that program seems trivial but actually has important implications; for instance, that your environment works, that you know how to feed programs to the compiler, that you can actually run the output. I never took "hello world" seriously until I started doing embedded systems work; it's now an extraordinarily important tool for me (I work an anomalously weird number of di…
I once had a particularly slow week at work, and decided to write an article about how "Hello World" works in C. How it really works -- including compiling, linking, system calls, operating system involvement, hardware I/O, communication between ICs, etc. The path from the block of text to photons emitting from the screen, with fairly detailed explanations at every level. I ended up with a 50 page LaTeX document that…
It takes on an even simpler program, namely:
int main() {
return 42;
}
Hope it's helpful
This situation is why there is "hello world"; that program seems trivial but actually has important implications; for instance, that your environment works, that you know how to feed programs to the compiler, that you can actually run the output. I never took "hello world" seriously until I started doing embedded systems work; it's now an extraordinarily important tool for me (I work an anomalously weird number of di…
I once had a particularly slow week at work, and decided to write an article about how "Hello World" works in C. How it really works -- including compiling, linking, system calls, operating system involvement, hardware I/O, communication between ICs, etc. The path from the block of text to photons emitting from the screen, with fairly detailed explanations at every level. I ended up with a 50 page LaTeX document that…
That reminds me of JBQ's blog post from shortly after Dennis Ritchie's death: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cn...
I would love to see that document if you still have it.
A minor point, but important to understand: the error came from the linker, not the compiler. It compiled just fine.
Didn't someone win a IOCCC some years ago by providing an empty file that got compiled successfully?