On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 10:07:42PM +0800, John Summerfied wrote: > >Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. As I said before, C is an elegant and > >small language, and this book is all you need. (Although you may also want > >to pick up The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Rob Pike.) > K&R C is no longer current, and I think it will give gcc severe heartburn. As mentioned before, the updated second edition is ANSI C. That's not C99, but gcc will be completely happy. > There are altogether too many mistakes a C programmer can make that will > give rise to all sorts of program bugs including buffer overruns, > pointer overruns and underruns and many more. Same with C++. *shrug*. > There are uses for C; it was originally designed for programming > operating systems and such, and really is not well-suited at a > general-purpose programming language. > The act you _can_ write almost any program you can conceive in C doesn't > mean you should do so. The fact that you *can* write bad programs doesn't mean you shouldn't learn a programming language. > C doesn't do strings. > C doesn't do fixed-point. > Both are needed in business applications. "Doesn't do" isn't correct at all. "Doesn't have as a language feature" is better. And of course, C *does* have strings of a sort. Anyway, with open source, there are good libraries out there to do both. > > C++ is another matter altogether, and provided programmers use the C++ > features, code written in C++ is likely to be more reliable than > equivalent code written by equivalently-capable C programmers. It's not *all* altogether a different matter, but generally, yeah, this is why I advise getting a good book that teachs C++ as an object-oriented langauge from the ground up rather than as a stepping-stone from C. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> Current office temperature: 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
