stormrider

Walking through the C language

What do these books have in common?

• The K&R whitebook
• The UNIX Programming Environment
• The C Standard Library
• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Well, a couple of things:

• They’re all good books on the C language and how to use it in a UNIX/Linux OS.
• They’re just about all you need to thoroughly learn C programming under UNIX/Linux.
• They’re not the best starting point for really learning C.

I have programmed in C for years, but now that I’ve retired, I’m trying to get scary good. I plan to walk all four of those books, but first I want to actually do something significant in C and learn by knockabout education. Then the books will make more sense and I can learn some of the theory I’ve missed out on during my career.

The BSD calendar program

I’m starting by trying to build my version of the BSD calendar program. I’m not looking at their code at all, just trying to create a similar program, including a great deal of additional functionality that the original program doesn’t include. I don’t even have a good inventory of what all that functionality actually is right now, except that I think the calendar CLI program can approximate a lot of the stuff that Emacs org-mode will do, and even some of the stuff it won’t do (weekdays/weekends, 3rd Wednesday, etc.).

I’m keeping the code in my stdlin.h, you can also watch it evolve from there.

Here are the steps so far, in order:

1. Get a C program up and running: Basic stuff you have to do before you can run C. Assumes a MacBook Pro, but you can use anything, really – just know that some of the loading instructions will be different.

2. Build a robust stub program: Just me doing what I’ve been doing for about 50 years, building a framework that minimizes stupid before coding said stupid.