Resources to learn C?

7    19 Jun 2015 19:10 by u/Boomi

I'm learning C right now for school, I've never touched a programming language before this, I'm fine with basic flow stuff like if statements but its comes to looping or functions and pointers I get lost.

13 comments

3 u/philomath 19 Jun 2015 20:22

Have you looked at Kahn Academy? They're typically pretty solid with that type of stuff. Also, I Have heard good stuff about http://www.codecademy.com

2 u/fbWright 19 Jun 2015 19:51

Have you checked out Learn C and Learn C the hard way yet? What is exactly that you don't understand about looping/functions/pointers?

2 u/PhantomOfTheTypes 19 Jun 2015 20:08

I highly recommend any of "The Hard Way" books.

0 u/HentaiOjisan 20 Jun 2015 13:36

Yeah, I really recommend them too! However maybe they are a bit hard for someone who has never programmed at all... And for the C one you need (or at least it's highly recommendable) to use linux too. And if he is new to all that it can be a bit overwhelming.

I quote their "The setup" part about Windows:

Windows

For Windows users I'll show you how to get a basic Ubuntu Linux system up and running in a virtual machine so that you can still do all of my exercises, but avoid all the painful Windows installation problems.

On the other hand... learning linux at the same time never hurts! And we are very friendly at /v/linux :D

1 u/water_and_shade 19 Jun 2015 20:05

Here is my university's into to C course. There are two recommended textbooks/resources listed, as well as pdf's of the lectures about all the topics we cover, which you can use to supplement your own learning. Good luck; C is a bitch of a first language.

1 u/voat9000 19 Jun 2015 20:19

The really standard text is K&R: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language and it's very good. I'd recommend it.

One thing to keep in mind is that even when you're an expert in C a great deal of the time programming is spent reading man pages, e.g. 'man fopen' when making sure you open a file for reading or writing correctly. Don't get discouraged or feel slow because you are looking over docs a lot - that's how you get things right.

1 u/thelordofcheese 19 Jun 2015 20:26

/v/askstallman

1 u/nonethewiser 19 Jun 2015 20:47

Google yourself "learn C the hard way."

Excellent resource. Easy to pick up where you left off. Highly recommended for young/beginning programmers.

1 u/Vladar 19 Jun 2015 21:07

Though this book is targeted at somewhat experienced coders, I highly recommend 21st Century C, 2nd Edition.

0 u/forty-bot 23 Jun 2015 00:39

After you've gone through an introductory text, http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ is a cool way to put your skills into practice.