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>>Everything from there up seems to be self-taught, either from the internet, code examples, or working it out from first principles.

But to be fair, can't that be said that nearly everything is self-taught? From Physics, to mathematics, to music performance and theory, to learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car -- we can read but it takes some time to internalize the structure of each discipline and "own" it.

>>in embedded work you don't get to use the latest version I work in C77, and I'm reminded of how far C (and C++) has come each time I have to #define that fancy new-fangled "boolean" type.

>>I think a lot of the "pure C" people are disguised as electronics engineers... Agreed, this is exactly right. Most if not all of the pure-c world is due to embedded micros with strict limitations (<1k RAM, etc.)

> I work in C77

Do you mean C89? I've never heard of C77 and a quick Google search came up with nothing.

I've touched this part of clang. No C77 but there is a C94 I was surprised to find.

maybe got confused with F77.

It looks like the author removed the bit about C77 from their post.

Although ANSI C wasn't a thing until 1989, the language had been around since 1972.

The original K&R book was published in 1978, and if you read it, you'll see C that's noticeably different from C89 or newer. 'C77' was probably just a fun bit of shorthand pjc50 used to describe old, K&R style C. Or at least C that's missing some ANSI features.

This was the very first time I ever saw anyone using the term C77. I really doubt the term was used knowingly instead of mixing up C with F77.

> But to be fair, can't that be said that nearly everything is self-taught?

Let's say that is true. The bottleneck is more about how much you can dedicate to the learning. You run out of time eventually.

I like seeing if I can dig up PDF copies of books mentioned on here. I haven't found that many yet, but, FWIW, I did for this book!

I won't link to it directly; instead, the open directory (which lists a pile of other PDFs) is https://doc.lagout.org/programmation/C/.

>C development, like most languages, isn't really "taught" at all. You might have some teaching on the structure of the language and a basic getting started course on main(), but that's just the beginning. Everything from there up seems to be self-taught, either from the internet, code examples, or working it out from first principles.

If there's one thing my CS program did correctly, it was having a two semester course (sort of, officially they were two separate courses) that covered an intro to C programming but also C in terms of machine architecture, down to learning to disassemble C or assemble it from assembly, etc.

I think it was fairly valuable at the time to learn how and why C is important/forms the lowest layer for 'modern' languages.

Can you recommend any books for the more advance uses you stated? I’m currently going through MOOCs and most courses seem to focus on the language itself as opposed to why the language is useful.