[Techtalk] C programming "course"

[Julie]

Malcolm-Rannirl wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday 09 January 2002 09:33 pm, Julie wrote:
> 
> > > I'd recommend against trying to learn from K&R. Have a copy as reference,
> > > yes, it's very good at that. It's not easy to learn from though (tried
> > > that one myself).
> 
> > Millions of years ago, while the earth was still warm and dinosaurs
> > roamed the planet, that's all there was.
> 
> I know, but as I was born after the CT extinction, I actually found a couple
> of other reference books. :)

Oh, I'm being a tease.  When I learned C, which was about '81 or so,
there just weren't any good books on it.  My professors in college
swore the language was useless.  I wound up doing a senior seminar
at The University of New Orleans in '84 and installed the first UNIX
system on campus.  So I was either going to teach myself or never
learn.

> > My experience is that there
> > is no substitute for actually programming and looking at code written
> > by more experienced programmers.
> 
> I'd argue that a good tutor can be better at looking at other people's code.
> Most code is not self explanatory if you don't understand the language yet.

You've never read my source code, have you?

http://www.redhat.com/swr/src/shadow-utils-20000826-4.src.html

Perhaps the =best= reason for commenting code is making sure
people are able to understand it.  Different people can have
profoundly different coding styles and ways of implenting the
same functionality.  Just knowing the language isn't enough.

I'll have to post some of my hand-rolled parser code with the
comments stripped out.  That'll convince even the most die-hard
"But my code is self-commenting!" fanatic that there is no such
thing as "self-commenting code".
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
jockgrrl at austin.rr.com                 or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller