Re:Ask HN: Best book to learn C in 2022?
by tialaramex on Saturday October 08, 2022 @01:40PM
(#33134301)
> One can get a solid grounding in C reading Seacord's books and John Regehr's blog without even needing to know who K and R are.
I'm not familiar with John Regehr - At least recently, Regehr's blog appears to be extremely low level (relative to C at least). Reading about the IR in LLVM or the ARM machine code which makes a spinlock go isn't a "solid grounding in C". It's fascinating - but it's not about C. Perhaps he used to write more about C?
Robert Seacord though, I just don't see it. I think you've recommended Seacord because you're thinking about what you'd need to write good software in C in 2022. But if we wanted to write good software in 2022 we shouldn't use C for that task in the first place. That's my point here. "Secure Coding in C" goes on the shelf next to "Agile Development using the Waterfall Model" and "Version Control using Visual SourceSafe". In each case these should be one paragraph inside, "Better not I think".
My assumption is that the OP is curious about the language, to the extent maybe they'll solve Advent of Code in it or something, not that they're about to write or maintain serious C software.
I'm not familiar with John Regehr - At least recently, Regehr's blog appears to be extremely low level (relative to C at least). Reading about the IR in LLVM or the ARM machine code which makes a spinlock go isn't a "solid grounding in C". It's fascinating - but it's not about C. Perhaps he used to write more about C?
Robert Seacord though, I just don't see it. I think you've recommended Seacord because you're thinking about what you'd need to write good software in C in 2022. But if we wanted to write good software in 2022 we shouldn't use C for that task in the first place. That's my point here. "Secure Coding in C" goes on the shelf next to "Agile Development using the Waterfall Model" and "Version Control using Visual SourceSafe". In each case these should be one paragraph inside, "Better not I think".
My assumption is that the OP is curious about the language, to the extent maybe they'll solve Advent of Code in it or something, not that they're about to write or maintain serious C software.