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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?

#21

Post by there »

whatever you do, make your examples bulletproof. even if it's not how you would normally write the code and it seems overly cautious, do your audience a favor and write the example that way anyway.

if there are any buffer overflows, integer overflows, off-by-one's, signedness issues, failure to check return values of everything, use of typically insecure things like sprintf instead of snprintf, all of these problems will just carry over into your readers' code. please do us all a favor and stress the importance of writing secure code from the ground up and not as an afterthought or something only done just before releasing it.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#22

Post by dfox »

What I really miss is some C book that teaches the modern approach to "object-oriented" C (as done in Gtk, Apache, CPython etc.). Actually many programmers (presumably with only passing knowledge of C programming) even actively proclaim that you cannot program in C in this style.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#23

Post by alnayyir »

there wrote: post #21

whatever you do, make your examples bulletproof. even if it's not how you would normally write the code and it seems overly cautious, do your audience a favor and write the example that way anyway. if there are any buffer overflows, integer overflows, off-by-one's, signedness issues, failure to check return values of everything, use of typically insecure things like sprintf instead of snprintf, all of these problems…

I don't think the learner would appreciate the subtleties, and I don't agree that they'll learn anything from it.

I can reinforce each lesson/problem you're describing one by one through the exercises, but a new person simply wouldn't know good code if it slapped them in the face.

Confer with Learn Python the Hard Way to get a feel for the aesthetic and technique I'm working towards.

I don't want to write bulletproof code, I want to teach them how and why to write bulletproof code.

I'm not qualified to meet that kind of lofty standard anyway.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#25

Post by alnayyir »

dfox wrote: post #22

What I really miss is some C book that teaches the modern approach to "object-oriented" C (as done in Gtk, Apache, CPython etc.). Actually many programmers (presumably with only passing knowledge of C programming) even actively proclaim that you cannot program in C in this style.

I'll teach function pointers, and might expose them to some style of OO C, but I haven't made any decisions on it.

My approach is going to be relatively unflavored by the Macro Hell of other projects. I'd rather not instill those habits. They can learn that on their own time.

I want the learner prepared to write clean sysprog code. That's it, the rest they can learn having been taught proper C and make their own stylistic decisions.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#26

Post by misham »

Why not base it on a project? If you want more people to do systems programming (I am assuming kernel and driver development), why not take something from http://kernelnewbies.org/ and turn it into a simple project or write a character driver. People will learn how to write code for the Linux Kernel, learn how to interact with that community and perhaps become more interested in systems development as a result, if that is your goal.

In the context of writing a driver, you will have to cover concurrency, multi-threading, semaphores/mutexes, function pointers (callbacks), memory management, etc.

One personal side note, would be nice if you integrate TTD into the projects. The number of C developers that I deal with who do not understand the concept of a unit test is amazing.

Also, please cover C99 and talk a little about compilers, linkers and assemblers. You can concentrate only on one binary format (doesn't matter which one) as long as you explain a little bit about how your C code gets converted into machine format and what does that mean.

I would ask myself: "What makes my book on C different from all the other ones?"

Why should I spend my time on reading your book instead of any number of other tutorials or K&R?

EDIT:

Forgot to add, please provide a public repository for your code examples and start using something like Git right away. That's one thing I really enjoy from all the Rails books, they push you into using an RCS immediately.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#27

Post by dfox »

dfox wrote: post #22

What I really miss is some C book that teaches the modern approach to "object-oriented" C (as done in Gtk, Apache, CPython etc.). Actually many programmers (presumably with only passing knowledge of C programming) even actively proclaim that you cannot program in C in this style.

And what comes almost directly from this is using (and writing) libraries and not programming everything yourself from scratch. NIH syndrome is particularly strong in many C programmers.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#28

Post by jswinghammer »

alnayyir wrote: post #19
jswinghammer wrote: post #17

Honestly 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.

Yeah I know but if you bring something in the same spirit to the web it might be good.

I grew up as a programmer reading it too so I appreciate what you're saying.

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#29

Post by alnayyir »

wyclif wrote: post #9
alnayyir wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing this book precisely because programmers who already know a language aren't ever getting around to learning systems programming or how things work.

I hear you, I voted a few days ago for the C book and this is why I did (and I'm primarily a Python guy).

I am doing this precisely for you and everyone like you.

I'm a professional python dev :)

Re: What do you want to see in Learn C The Hard Way?

#30

Post by misham »

there wrote: post #21

whatever you do, make your examples bulletproof. even if it's not how you would normally write the code and it seems overly cautious, do your audience a favor and write the example that way anyway. if there are any buffer overflows, integer overflows, off-by-one's, signedness issues, failure to check return values of everything, use of typically insecure things like sprintf instead of snprintf, all of these problems…

I disagree. If I'm learning a new language, I'm too busy worrying about the commas and semi-colons, not whether or not I'm using strcat or strncat. Worrying about overflows, signedness, etc. is something you do once you're more comfortable with the language.

It would be nice to provide links to articles and books on why one should use snprintf instead of sprintf or what is integer overflow and how do you deal with it and other topics for writing secure code.

However, as a beginner, it will simply not register since I'm more worried about having used a period instead of an arrow to access a struct member.

Perhaps, instead of writing a beginner C book, an advanced C book is needed more.

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