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Comment by tater | Hacker News Reader

Learning C takes a bit more than learning than its syntax. Feeding someone this and telling them they now know C is a recipe for disaster. The "Best to find yourself a copy of K&R" line is the only line that should be there.

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I was brought up on K&R. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone anymore. Much like a Java certification, most of it will have to be unlearned in real life. It's littered with holes and land mines and misses a massive chunk of the surrounding tooling and all the idioms which make for a good C program that won't kill you or your immediate successor who has to maintain what you've written.

I'd go with Zed's Learn C The Hard Way, then 21st Century C and go from there.

Zed made a really good intro to C. I was surprised. My only issue with it was he introduced readers to bstring instead of something UTF, but still better than vanilla chars. I wouldn't even know an UTF library for C with permissive license and lightweight on top of my head. C coding is all about memory management and data structures layout.

Agree but Unicode is a rather complicated diversion. In a lot of circumstances it's not really required as well. It's definitely a reading on subject.

Also, bstr stops a lot of simple tasks looking impossible and therefore motivates people.

Further to that, if you consider Java, Python, C# etc, you're using massive libraries at a very high abstraction level and it is considered normal. There isn't anything built into C like that.

I agree completely with you on all counts. He didn't made a wrong choice with bstrlib by far. I just felt there was a strong movement in recent years to move towards utf in general, so why not expose beginners to it as well, just as a part of overall strategy. It's not a trivial issue to tackle though for sure.

Indeed, my first reaction is "no you won't." Even a low-level language like C has its quirks that will bite you -- undefined behavior, for example, or even how many bits wide an int is. Not to mention that knowing C involves a lot of knowing the standard library, which doesn't happen in minutes.

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