[Swlug] C Programming Book Recommendations

[Huw Ford (ConceptPC)]

Hi,

I agree that C might not be the ideal 'first' serious programming
language, but after 40 years of programming, I’m still not entirely sure
which one would be.

I started with assembler on the 6502 CPU, then moved on to the 68000.
 From there, I learned K&R C (Kernighan and Ritchie). My background in
assembler, especially with memory addressing, helped me make sense of
C’s pointers. Later, I transitioned to ANSI C.

After that came C++. Once I got my head around object-oriented
programming (OOP), I really fell in love with it.

Eventually, I got into PHP and JavaScript, both of which are
syntactically similar to C in many ways.

But the language that really expanded my thinking was Erlang. It was so
different from anything else I’d ever used. That said, I wouldn’t
recommend Erlang unless you had a specific use case for it.

I’ve worked with people who recommend Java as a good first language—it’s
quite similar to C but without the headaches of manual memory
management. However, I haven’t had any first-hand experience with it myself.

Hope this helps.

Huw


On 23/10/2024 10:16, Neil Greenwood via Swlug wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Oct 2024, 10:04 Morgan Green via Swlug,
> <swlug at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I am very new to programming, but I want to start out on C to
>     grasp the fundamentals of all programming languages. Can anyone
>     recommend me any paperbooks on C programming that is suitable for
>     complete beginners?
>
>     Kind regards,
>     Morgan Green
>
>
> Hi Morgan,
>
> I'm not sure C is the best language for a beginner. You have a lot of
> extra work to do managing memory - my first C program (after I had 8
> years experience with 2-3 other languages) just segfaulted, and I
> never fixed it!
>
> If you are just starting out, my recommendation is to look at Python -
> apart from the strict indentation requirement, it's much more
> friendly. This will give you a good understanding of the fundamentals
> that are present in most languages.
>
> If you want dead-tree books, Pragmatic Press make a good series of
> introductory titles for both C and Python, as well as a wife range of
> other languages.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Neil
>
>
>     Sent from Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
>     --
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>
>
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