Don't Learn C the Wrong Way • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Learn C the Wrong Way

#51

Post by bphogan » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:47 PM UTC

youngtaff wrote: post #48

necrodawg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a pity that people can't see past him being "combative and dogmatic". I don't agree that it takes away from the core message of his work at all. A lot of really smart people are cantankerous, and often they can afford to be.

The only time I've met Zed I found him to be a perfectly pleasant and non-cantankerous person. My understanding of his approach to teaching is that it's based getting people to do things that bring results and then getting them to understand why after - which I think is a perfectly sensible one for beginners

It is very good. There's an educational philosophy around this that state that people who are new need to know "why should I care" first, then "how do I do it" next, followed by "ok, why does it work that way?" last.

When you're cooking, you follow a recipe. When you are learning to be a cook, you graduate to figuring out why you do it the way the recipe did.

And when you get really good, you start saying things like "Well, I wouldn't teach people to cook THAT way! That's wrong!"

:)

Re: Don't Learn C the Wrong Way

#52

Post by shadowfox » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:05 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #41

shadowfox wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure what is new here. The MSVC compiler has been available for free for close to a decade at least and command line compilation was available ever since I first used it (in the mid 90s)

I wasn't aware of that. I suppose it came with the driver dev kits? I've not really been into windows development, but I thought I'd at least have brushed up it accidentally if one could use the official MSVC compiler to produce shareware and commercial software for free? Were there any (free) IDEs that took advantage of this? I thought one of the reasons Stevens used DJGPP was that MSVC wasn't available for free? I…

I did literally mean a decade for the compiler (so 2005). While it is not a full IDE by any means, VS Express did include the standard VS compiler. You could compile most standard C programs on windows with that. For some time prior to that you could get a compiler with the DDK as well (but I don't remember since when; it has been a long time). Of course express didn't pack some of the libraries that came with VS; you could get most of them via the SDK and DDK however.

In the 90s though, I used the non-free VS for the most part along with some Cygwin until Mingw's appearence in the late 90s.

Re: Don't Learn C the Wrong Way

#53

Post by anth1y » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

a-saleh wrote: post #36

I'd like to hijack part of this discussion and ask, if any of you know about a good modern c programming book. Because I'd like to read the K&R C destructuring book, not just a removed chapter at the end of the book :-) I somehow thought that notion, that K&R C is somewhat outdated in their code examples is widely accepted (biggest gripe is little to no input sanitation, afaik (?)), so a book about "this is what we l…

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033677.do

Hope this helps....