Other than K&R (which everyone knows about), what is the current CW on best C books?
What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
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Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#12What would be the scope of the book?
I saw Zed mention the same title on his blog once. His idea was to provide something for programmers with experience in other languages and some basic knowledge of C. As I fit in that category, I'd like to see something beyond K&R. Especially some stuff on organizing modern projects written in C, makefiles etc.
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#13Just one request: Would you be able to release individual chapters as you are done with them instead of waiting to finish the whole book? Thanks!
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#14Lots of segmentation fault diagnosis
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#15Make sure you explain pointers well, the additional level of indirection introduced by them is usually hard to grasp for beginners. Show the relation between pointers and arrays. Offer some best practices on using pointers. Explain the most common caveats like buffer overflows, problems with null terminated strings or off by one errors.
Even better, make sure you explain function pointers well.
Even better, I'll explain when and why to use function pointers (finite state automata are a common use case)
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#16Lots of segmentation fault diagnosis
I know a lot of new people run into perpetual segfault, but I don't think that's really a HUGE hang-up once you get past the basics.
I'll consider some "break it and fix it" exercises for diagnosing these kinds of problems though.
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#17Honestly the closer you stay to the spirit of K&R the better the site would be. I've looked at a lot of C books over the years and K&R is the only one I thought was even decent.
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#18Just one request: Would you be able to release individual chapters as you are done with them instead of waiting to finish the whole book? Thanks!
Plan on it, I'll be working on a tight feedback loop since I'm not even remotely qualified enough to be doing this.
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#19Honestly the closer you stay to the spirit of K&R the better the site would be. I've looked at a lot of C books over the years and K&R is the only one I thought was even decent.
I'm not trying to replace K&R, but I'll be inspired by it since I grew up with it.
Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?
#20Other than K&R (which everyone knows about), what is the current CW on best C books?
You usually have to get pretty implementation/purpose specific beyond that. More often than not, the next step is APUE, which is dissatisfactory for what I have in mind.