Learn C The Hard Way by Zed Shaw

http://www.udemy.com/learn-c-the-hard-way/

by shawndumas • 14 years ago

268 96 14 years ago

aseembehl• 14 years ago

In case one does not want to spend $29, the free HTML book [1] (currently in beta) is good enough. I have been following along the book, and can vouch for it. It is a great way to learn to code in C.

[1] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

EDIT: By posting the link to the book, I by no means meant that the videos are redundant. I would love it if more people en-roll for Zed's Udemy course and support him.

johnohara3• 14 years ago

How much $$ have you spent on lattes reading his free book?

Books, videos and course materials don't just happen because we say so. Real people create this stuff.

benmanns2• 14 years ago

It amazes me that people invest 20 hours in reading a book and complain about the price. If we assume roughly $40/hr for a $80k programmer, this is about $800 worth of time you're investing. Does a "hard" investment of $29 (4%) really make that big of a difference?

shadowfiend3• 14 years ago

Zed Shaw has made the book available for free. It's perfectly acceptable to point that out (indeed, it's linked from the udemy summary anyway). If you need more than the book, you can pay for the course. This is why it is labelled a "companion". There is nothing morally bankrupt about using the resource that has been graciously given away for free: it seems evident that Zed Shaw intended the book to be free, so use that fact. If you need more, he believes it's worth $29 of your money to access the additional materials.

There's a really good argument to be made if the OP were linking to a bootlegged free version of a book that costs money, but it's really silly to criticize him for pointing out the free version of the free book on the thread about its companion course.

DannoHung• 14 years ago

You can also compile the book into a PDF if you'd like. Zed made the code available so all it takes is the effort involved to install the right LaTeX modules.

Took part of an afternoon to figure out how to build it.

skrubly• 14 years ago

I'm excited - Learn Python the Hard Way completely jumpstarted me into what has become a large internal django site, and I refer back to it often. I really enjoy python, and I thank Zed for the straightforward aproach.

So even though I love python I want to see if the same technique can introduce me again to C, a language I never felt comfortable with.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Learn Python the Hard Way is great, although I can't say I've read that many Python books, but I though his approach was a very good way to learn Python.

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

Try going through the HTML version, and drop comments when you hit problems. That'll help me make the book solid.

esbwhat2• 14 years ago

Are guest comments ever going to be an option? I don't really want to make a disqus account. I understand if not, but I figured I'd ask anyway.

thdn• 14 years ago

I'm really considering to take this one, but I've would like to consider other alternatives, anyone knows other online c classes?

philsmith35• 14 years ago

Harvard's CS50 (cs50.net) is an introductory computer science course that teaches C. Full course (lecture videos + problem sets) is available free online.

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

The video course is being worked on by me while I write the book, so expect it to be rough around the edges.

But, I say try going through the HTML version online, and as you do get stuck write comments to ask me questions. That's why I put it online for free, so that I get student feedback while I write the book.

bendemott2• 14 years ago

I'm really glad to see that C can get in the spotlight even on HN.

rudiger• 14 years ago

Is it really surprising that C can get in the spotlight even on Hacker News? It's the quintessential hacker programming language!

bendemott2• 14 years ago

I guess I wasn't feeling an optimist on the day I posted that... Good Point!

antirez• 14 years ago

I just scanned through the free HTML book and this looks definitely a good start for a modern "get started fast" book about C: everything is important about the language seems to be covered. Good work.

z1g1• 14 years ago

I am working with his learn python the hard way course on udemy and his book and videos have helped me get going

millerfung• 14 years ago

Nevertheless, Zed is helping lots of people out there who is eager to learn coding like me, I could imagine back in the days if you want to learn coding there are tons of resources out there, probably too many, that you don't know which one is good and it cost you money. Now, people like me can always go to his book finish the course and look for what is missing without spending a buck.

waffle_ss• 14 years ago

I was wondering how this compares with or compliments K&R, when I came across [this section][1] of the book that seems to slap it in the face. Here's a section from the second paragraph:

You see, "K&R C" is actually riddled with bugs and bad style. Its age is no excuse. These were bugs when they wrote the first printing, and the 42nd printing. I hadn't actually realized just how bad most of the code was in this book and recommended it to many people. After reading through it for just an hour I decided that it needs to be taken down from its pedestal and relegated to history rather than vaunted as state of the art.

This seems a bit hyperbolic to me... I just read K&R several years ago during school (could definitely use a re-read) but remember absolutely loving it for the combination of brevity and density of information conveyed. I'm not much of a C programmer though so I don't really know. Could a modern C programmer respond / elaborate?

[1] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-waych...

mkr-hn3• 14 years ago

That page has examples and detailed explanations to support the criticism.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

The problem is that the examples and explanations don't justify the level of castigation. Yes, you should always use strncpy() instead of strcpy() for instance, but that doesn't protect you from all bugs. The example of a safercopy() still relies on the assumption that the pointers given to it are valid, and that assumption is just as impossible prove as the assumption that copy()'s input strings are valid. Safercopy() is still twice as safe as copy() and we ought to use it, but calling copy() "defective" is unfair unless you're willing to call the C language defective in general. And you can make that argument! I certainly like languages like Go that have pointers but no casting ints to pointers or pointer arithmetic, so the only remaining danger is pointers to memory that has been freed.

Jabbles2• 14 years ago

It's a bit like claiming memcpy() is bugged because it can crash your program. Well, true, it is good style to program defensively against memory corruptions, buffer overflows etc, and in that respect K&R may teach students bad habits.

I think it's a bit much to say that it should never have been written like that, as at the time people knew so much less about building complex projects, sources of error and defensive programming.

Keeping a book up to date takes a lot of effort, as I'm sure Zed (npi) appreciates. It's an old book, it has warts. As you stated, the density of information was what many people like about the book, so any replacement for it will have to replicate that. I don't think the criticism is unfounded though.

mkr-hn3• 14 years ago

I remember the gist of the critique being that the K&R book was perfect for the assumptions of its era, but can mislead people who aren't experienced enough to apply its lessons to the modern networked world

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

memcpy is just fine because it has a size parameter. I think you mean strcpy(), which does cause defects.

Roboprog• 14 years ago

heh heh. Who would have expected mercy and respect from the guy that made the (paraphrased) "pro-mo-fo" website (first saw it at Atlassian conference about 2 weeks ago, pretty funny though perhaps a bit rude). I think the guy is more than willing to point out any practices now deemed harmful, tradition be damned. I'm over it.

byproxy2• 14 years ago

Just a little something that irked me:

Guitar however is a weird instrument that doesn't really work with notation, so guitarists have an alternative notation called "tablature".

This is incorrect. Guitar works perfectly fine with standard notation. It may be somewhat difficult to figure out fingerings if the music isn't arranged for guitar, but it's not much harder than playing piano without fingering information. I agree with the overall analogy (that tablature is initially easier than sheet music, but ultimately restrictive), though.

aphyr2• 14 years ago

Huh, really? I always figured piano had an unambiguous mapping from pitch to keys, whereas guitar typically has 2 or 3 possible fingerings for a given pitch. I find it pretty easy to get stuck with awkward positions on my first few times through a guitar piece--except those in which transitional notes are annotated with fret positions. Is that what you mean by "arranged for guitar"?

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

No, it doesn't. Go find middle C. See how on the piano it's in the middle of the piano, and also in the middle of the grand staff? Now, find one of the many on the guitar. Not really in the "middle" are they? Even the left and right hand and the grand staff fit better. The location of submediant, inversions, arpeggios, distance in intervals, all map better on a piano than a guitar.

readme2• 14 years ago

Learn C the hard way

You bet it will be hard to learn when you shun the best book ever written on the language, coauthored by the designer of the language!

Mithrandir• 14 years ago

There's also a "Learn Python The Hard Way" course: http://www.udemy.com/learn-python-the-hard-way/

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

Just a warning to everyone, like the book this course is in development as I write the book. It's covering a lot of the chapters, but I have to go back and clean up some videos and do the final ones. That's why the price is low for now.

stock_toaster2• 14 years ago

I watched the intro on udemy. Very cool.

You talked about installing xcode. For newer osx versions, people may be able to install just the [command line tools for xcode][1], which is only about 170MB or so. It might save some people from waiting around for the full xcode.

[1] http://kennethreitz.com/xcode-gcc-and-homebrew.html

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

Yes, I have to update to point people there. Apparently also the latest xcode is missing a bunch of stuff people might need and requires separate downloads of those pieces. I forget what but it's still annoying.

mhartl4• 14 years ago

What's your method for making the ePub version of your books? I'm considering writing a custom program for my own stuff, but I'd love to be able to use something off the shelf.

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

I'm ditching ePub. It's a crap format that has a bewildering number of options and it seems every viewer wants to implement some different subset of them.

From now on, it's PDF and HTML only.

davidw• 14 years ago

Sigil is open source.

2mur• 14 years ago

What I really like about LCTHW (after reading K&R and then just not doing anything with it) was starting you out using the tools and best practices right from the beginning. Make and valgrind up front. It got me over the hump of syntax&language --> actually using.

ryansama• 14 years ago

Most awesome. Even though it have plenty already, I would be more than happy to pay more for more chapters.

jheriko4• 14 years ago

I did look at this book a while ago, I was unable to make amendments to the code examples. early versions made common C gotcha mistakes, although of the more subtle and less disasterous kinds... starting with non-standard entry-point function signature and generally relying on non-standard features of particular compilers. fortunately someone else seems to have gotten there in the end... i'd be wary, simply because the author is (as much as I am a fan of much of his work) clearly not an experienced C programmer.

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

I am a very experienced C programmer, and I have full comments on any page. You find an error, drop a comment and I'll fix it immediately.

Chances are though, you're someone who read the K&R chapter, then went through nitpicking minor semantics about things like "NULL is 0" and then consider all the code broken in the book.

But, any errors you find, let me know and I'll fix them. Just don't call me an inexperienced C programmer.

arturhoo• 14 years ago

There is a typo in the first sentence: "This will be the companion course to my new book, "Learn C The Hard Way" whch I'm working on right now".

You probably want to fix that.

baby2• 14 years ago

It's funny how, I started getting annoyed seeing people still learning to code on books while free tutorials were starting to pop up everywhere on internet.

And now people are starting to charge for those tutorials. And I know people here in HN love Zed Shaw. But come on, there are hundreds of free great tutorials to learn C on internet.

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

My HTML version is still free, and if you tell me of the free C books I'll link to them here:

http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html

baby2• 14 years ago

Right, started reading into it. Very good! Thanks.

mitchi• 14 years ago

I disagree with your disdain for IDEs... I hope that you are not totally misleading the people who will learn from your book because learning how to use the capabilities of Visual Studio or any decent IDE is very valuable. How are they going to debug complex graph data structures in their CS class if they don't have a great debugger? How are they going to understand the power of intellisense in modern programming? How are they going to learn about compiler flags without getting a headache? How much time are they going to waste compiling and linking with the commandline?

I like the no-copy-paste and straight notepad approach trust me. It works for everyone, it's a solid way to get these things into your brain. You need to write code, there's no way around it. But to tell people to never use IDEs because they are bad and they make you a bad programmer is BULLSHIT.

malkia• 14 years ago

and what would they do if they cannot use this functionality, for example debugging something embedded, or something that cannot be debugged the way you pointed out

zedshaw15• 14 years ago

IDEs are bad for you. It's much better to simply use a real programmer's editor that you can craft into being what you need. In fact, I can usually take vim plus cscope, exuberant ctags, and ack and demolish any code base you throw at me. Similar with emacs and other power editors.

IDEs are usually useful if you're stuck using them to build GUIs or use specialized build tools they require.

Ygg22• 14 years ago

How can IDE be bad for me? It's like saying a hammer is bad for me (Sure it is if I don't use it responsibly or correctly). And on C front I'd agree. There are no really good IDEs for C/C++ and the way they work/are used wouldn't benefit much from an IDE.

If you are more productive in IDE over text, what is the benefit of using text editor?

Tomis02• 14 years ago

Please dear wizard, here's a list of requirements for a fellow programmer that he can currently do with Visual Studio and wants to do the same with vim:

- find in files (in vim, not in bash)

- replace in files

- rename symbol (uh-oh...)

- quick open file in project (visual assist feature)

- list of files in project (not in directory)

- build system (something easy to use, not that make bullshit)

- go to declaration/definition ( sometimes I get a list of 30 matches from ctags, so I would like something that actually works )

- view call hierarchy (callers, callees)

- code completion (something that works and is easy to use, like in visual assist)

- watches

- breakpoints in disassembly

- step into disassembly

- memory view while debugging

- edit & continue

- memory (data) breakpoints

We're talking about large C/C++ codebases, obviously. You might get 50% of the features above after tinkering for a few days/weeks/months with your vim with (probably) much worse usability, when you could have used Visual C++ from the get-go and enjoyed a "real programmer's editor", as you put it.

This bullshit religion you are introducing only hurts potential programmers because instead of focusing on getting their job done they have to reinvent the wheel every time they have to write a line of code. I'm not saying it's a bad thing for a young mind to experience the horror of having to debug a 500.000 LOC codebase with a stone-age debugger, just for the kicks ("that's how your old man was programming back in the day, son"), but when you have to meet deadlines and release something going vim-only can quickly become a liability.

Learn C The Hard Way by Zed Shaw

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