Ask HN: Code worth reading

6 points·gringomorcego··5 comments

I just graduated with a degree in CS, my school only taught me Java. I'd like to broaden myself first by learning C deeply.

Can anyone suggest any good (C?) code to learn from? Specifically, I would like code that doesn't deal with GUI stuff, and possibly related to networking/os internals. Hopefully something less idiosyncratic than the Linux kernel, because I'm not smart enough to grok any of that really.

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You should see some good ones and some bad ones. I'll let you decide which is which.

How about: Samba, sendmail, Apache, procmail, popa3d, proftpd.

You should also consider checking out other programs which in the same "space" as those, so that means postfix, qmail, qpopper, wuftpd, and so on.

See if you can find the original netcat (by hobbit) and then compare it to the GNU version.

Those are just the ones which come to mind at the moment, probably because they scarred me in some way.

Heh... I'm learning Java after picking up C. People will recommend K&R 2nd ed... but K&R doesn't cover quite a few things, including most modern c syntax...

Anyway try http://stackoverflow.com/questions/518984/good-examples-of-c...

Read literate programs. See "Implementing Elliptic Curve Cryptography", it is a program written as a book. Then learn to write your programs in literate form. Soon people will be reading your programs as examples.

Tim Daly

The book is out of print :(

I recommend reading the source code of Linux command line utilities and continuing with the kernel source code.

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