[Techtalk] C programming study group

[Bethany Seeger]

I'd love to join. I have significant experience in C, but am a little
rusty, so would like to join in and help out where I can. 

Given that it is C, might be good to cover basic Makefile writing and
usage.  (or CMake?  What's more popular now?  You can start with out
them, but once you get into a project with more then a few files, you're
going to want one.). 

Also, where I see people fall apart the most is memory management - I
would suggest that be between step 1 and 2 below, or at least an intro
to it  - stack vs. heap, static arrays versus dynamic arrays.  It really
takes a while for folks to grasp that, so I'd introduce that early and
often.   Though, I'd agree this depends on the level of programming
experience in general, but still probably good to cover, as higher level
languages don't give you quite the free range to shoot your own foot so
easily. :) 

A professor I had in college wrote Pointers On C - I thought it was
pretty good.

-Bethany

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 05:12 PM, Camilla wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> 
> I'm really happy people are interested in C! I've been trying to really
> master the language for a long time, but I always give up... This fall I
> am
> trying to follow along with MIT's Operating Systems Engineering class and
> knowing C will be quite handy.
> 
> Let's look at some practical issues:
> 
> *What study resources is everyone using?*
> I don't know of any decent online materials for studying C (apart from
> LinuxChix courses) so I am following Kernighan and Ritchie's book. If
> fellow LinuxChixxors want to recommend good books, I could go to the
> local
> uni library and try to check them out and post exercises and notes on the
> Piazza page for everyone to share.
> 
> 
> *How are we going to structure our study group?*
> Should we have a loose syllabus which we follow? We could agree on a
> weekly
> topic and a set of N mini coding exercises and then post and discuss
> them.
> Would this be a good format or would people prefer something less
> structured? Kernighan & Ritchie cover the following topics in their book:
> 
> 1. Basics
> -variables and arithmetic expressions
> -for statement
> -symbolic constants
> -character IO
> -arrays
> -functions
> -arguments
> -char arrays
> -external vars and scope
> 
> 2. Types, operators and expressions
> 
> 3. Control Flow
> 
> 4. Functions and Program Structure
> 
> 5. Pointers and Arrays
> 
> 6. Structures
> 
> 7. Input and Ouput
> 
> 8. UNIX System Interface
> 
> I am not very experienced in C, so perhaps advanced C guru chixxors could
> weigh in on the above study plan.
> Anyway, let me know what you think so we can get started on our C
> journey!
> 
> Regards,
> Camilla
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 2014-09-30 0:10 GMT+01:00 Bonnie King <b at bonnielking.com>:
> 
> > I'm interested!
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 5:06 PM, Camilla <camillamon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi Svaksha and Deborah,
> > > thank you for responding!
> > > I have setup a Piazza group http://piazza.com/linuxchix/fall2014/cs101.
> > > I don't know if you want to use it, but I have previously used it for
> > > programming intensive classes and found it
> > > to be better than Moodle for sharing code and answering questions. The
> > > enrollment code is *cs101 *.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Kind regards,
> > > Camilla
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Techtalk mailing list
> > > Techtalk at linuxchix.org
> > > http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Bonnie King
> > 773-799-4608
> >
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