Re: [SLUG] C newbie seeks directions

[Benno <benjl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu Feb 17, 2005 at 14:32:14 +1100, Rod Butcher wrote:
>Hello Sluggers, I'm having to teach myself some C so I can deal with
>debugging problems with C modules used by perl (my primary interest is
>the perl scripts, but I'm tired of feeling helpless when C programs
>won't build or just die).
>
>I've found an online university course tutorial which covers basic data
>types, operators, functions, prototyping, structures, pointers,
>malloc :-
>http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/
> It's dated 1999. Should this be enough, any major changes since then,
>any recommended tutorials out there ?

That will be fine. Unlike all these new languages C hasn't really changed
much. The latest spec was in 1999, however justa bout any tutorial out
there will be ok.

>Also - am I OK just working with a text editor like Gedit, or do I
>really need to use some API to do things properly ?

I'm confused by what you mean here. An application programming interface
(API) has little to do with a text editor. But basically the answer is yes,
any text editor is fine for writing C, however i would recommend an editor
that does syntax hilighting. (E.g: emacs, vim, nedit, <thousands of others>).

>Recommended newbie-friendly C mailing lists ?

There are plently of C coders on this mailing list who would be happy
answering questions.

>Anything else I should study to do this properly ? - I'm finding things
>like foo.xs which are used to generate  foo.c for instance, so is there
>some tutorial on "typical methods used for generating C sources &
>modules" ? 

I'm not sure what a .xs file is, generally you don't generate .c files, 
you write them.

Benno