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K&R C is no longer current, and I think it will give gcc severe heartburn.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.
The fact it's so hard to write correct programs makes it a poor beginners' 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.
It has arrays of characters, and the onus is entirely on the coder to choose appropriate functions, to keep track of string lengths, to test pointers and so on.
COBOL and PL/1 which I've used most do have strings. Proper strings. So does Pascal, and (Borland) Pascal does make serious efforts to help programmers write good safe programs.
Anyway, with open source, there are good libraries out there to do both.
If they are not standard parts of the language many programmers will not find them or will choose to not use them to aid portability of their code.
^^^ I did qualify my statement.
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.
--
Cheers John
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