Ask HN: Is there a good language overview for C? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a good language overview for C?

4 pointsmpgirro2 comments

A friend who has good programming knowledge with high programming languages (Java, Ruby, JS, etc) asked me if I knew a good introduction or language overview for the C programming language, because though it is not really necessary to know any C to study computer science any more, it is still (and I guess will be for a long time to come) a sort of reference language for everything low-level programming.

For C was the very first programming language I learned may years ago, I did not really had a good answer to this question. No I am looking into this, and had something in mind like gobyexamble.com (which was here in HN recently), just for C instead of Go.

Does anybody know of such a thing?

He probably doesn't want a book, but I'm going to recommend he beg, borrow, or steal K&R (ANSI ed). It does a great job, and with his backround it's just the level he needs.

What is more interesting is all the lost voodoo, that everyone half decent was expected to just know, especially if you were doing anything embedded or kernel hacking. This will help him to understand why it's low level when needed.

Like the lost art of structure packing (that most of us used to do automatically without thought). No one does that any more outside of embedded systems.

http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

Or some of the evil low level pointer hackery, but I'm not turning up anything great on google about this. Most sites claiming to have are dull run of the mill pointer operations. No unions of structs of arrays of pointers to functions doing evil trickery with inline assembler in sight! Amateurs!

SO post on "hidden features of C" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/132241/hidden-features-o...

Not very hidden most of them, but hey.

Obfuscated C Contest is good for making you friends' head hurt. Some really clever ones, so worth a look.

http://www.ioccc.org/

I think I may have spent too long C hacking in my 20s... :)

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/

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