[clug-progsig] Learning [C] Programming

[Chris Berry]

Hi all,

I had a thought in the car on the way home from tonight's meeting. I've 
mentioned C in the subject, but it really works for just about any 
language - even assembler if you must ;-)

Shawn's quite correct that you need a project to work on before you can 
really start learning to program. Where I disagree with him, though, is 
on the nature of the project. While it might be nice to have a grand 
goal in mind like "I want to build my own timesheet system", or "I want 
to write my own OS", the problem is you'll never get there, because you 
don't know where to start. Trying to write an original program from 
scratch for your first one is going to be even less use to you.

I was thinking what sorts of problems might be easy to solve for a 
beginner, and it occurred to me that Linux (well, Unix, I guess) gives 
us the answer. It's full of little programs that do small, specific 
jobs: programs like 'cat', 'head', 'tail', 'sort', 'uniq', 'touch', etc.

If you're a beginner wanting to learn how to write some code, you could 
do worse than to study the man page and behaviour for some of those 
programs and see if you can rewrite them from scratch yourself. It won't 
win you any awards, but you might learn something useful.

HTH.


Chris.