[LAU] OT: C or C++?

Robin Gareus robin at gareus.org
Wed Oct 13 22:32:47 UTC 2010


On 10/14/10 00:11, Folderol wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:03:19 +0200
> fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 03:42:46PM -0500, Josh Lawrence wrote:
>>
>>> Sparing you a lot of useless back story here, but for fun a for
>>> personal amusement (NOT for serious work), I'd like to start learning
>>> a programming language.  If I'm gonna learn one, I might as well learn
>>> something that gets a lot of use in the open-source world.  So which
>>> one to choose?  C or C++?
>>
>> First learn C. Make sure you go to the bottom of it.
>> Then learn C++, and select what's useful for you and what isn't.

I concur. Start with C.

a rule of thumb: for GUIs and complex structures: C++ ;for algorithms: C

Apart from some book, the 'manpages-dev' package (section 3 manual
pages) come in really handy. eg `man 3 printf` gives you a full overview
and even example code.

After you grasped some basics, reading other PPL's code is something
that helps a lot.

I've started some small off-list online tutoring; walking through
JACKd's simple_client.c and Fons's jnoise source with Philipp
Ueberbacher recently and can post our conversation if you're interested.

>> Ciao,
>>
> Glad to know I made the right decision!
> 
> // Still prevaricating with pointers and struggling with structures :(

I recently recommended this one to Philipp:
  http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/PointersAndMemory.pdf

It's an nice read and I especially like the first sentence:

"There's a lot of nice, tidy code you can write without knowing about
pointers. But once you learn to use the power of pointers, you can never
go back."

best,
robin


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