Re: Is "C For Dummies" any good?

From: Bernhard Holzmayer (holzmayer.bernhard_at_deadspam.com)
Date: 07/26/04 

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 08:17:10 +0200

K. G. Suarez wrote:

> Hello everyone.
>
> I am new to programming and my uncle gave me a copy of "C For
> Dummies 2nd Edition". I am up to chapter 9 right now. He probably
> saw me struggling with "The C Programming Language" by Ritchie and
> Kernigahn and felt bad.
>
> Does anyone have experience with this book? I feel that it is
> helping me along pretty well. But how much will this book teach
> me? What would be the next book to read?
>

My suggestion:

If you feel good with the book = it pleases you and you like the
style how it is written, then go ahead with it.

Don't expect that you'll be master of the C universe after you have
finished with you reading.

Learning C is (like learning any spoken language) learning
syntactical elements, semantical rules and then develop a living
style.
You may learn syntactical elements and some semantical rules from
such a book. Reading another one might add to your knowledge.

But at some certain point you have to made that decision, that
either you drop this language, or start living with it.

As soon as you make up your mind to make this language part of your
life, you'll start to really "learn C".

You'll stop reading books, you'll start reading code from other
developers, creating code by yourself, getting it criticized by
others, redoing it at a whole or part of it, and sometimes throw it
away after lots of wasted hours and days.

Years later, you might end up as a good programmer,
either because you started with a book like "C For Dummies" -
or because you dropped it and started with any other.

There are three important things:
from any hint anybody gives you, retrieve the good part and keep it.
from the same hint, retrieve the bad part, and ignore it.
go ahead with what you think is the best.

Bernhard