[prog] GNU C tutorial

[Rasjid Wilcox]

This was prompted by Sue's question re the stack and the heap.

Someone on one of these lists (I think) mentioned the GNU C Tutorial.  After 
some seaching I found it at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/ctut-mb-rwhe/.  
The text is only available via CVS in texi format, but I have done a 
conversion to pdf format.  I will email it to anyone on request.

A few warnings: The book is not complete.  Nor (it seems) will it ever be, 
since "This project has been cancelled due to unresolvable problems with the 
manuscript. We will start another book from scratch later. 2003-04-22 Lisa M. 
Goldstein, Managing Editor, GNU Press".

Personally, I'm not quite sure what the problems are.  I found the text (even 
in its incomplete state) very very useful.  I started reading it with zero 
knowledge of C.  I now think that I have a fighting chance of at least making 
some sense out of an existing piece of C code.  The reason I thought of it 
here is that gives quite a nice explanation of the stack and the heap etc.

The document is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, so I 
believe I can make the pdf publically available.  I'm about to mail one of 
the current admins to make sure that this is the case.  (It may be that the 
original author has withdrawn his permission for it to be licensed under the 
GFDL... I can find no indication of what the cause of the unresolvable 
problems are.)  I would like to put up a public url to the document, but feel 
that I should not do so until its status is clarified.

You can, of course, go to the homepage and do the pdf conversion yourself.  
The magic command is texi2pdf.  A can't remember if I had to do anything to 
the tex file to get it to run.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 

Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia  UTC + 10
http://www.openminddev.net