Is this book a meme?

is this book a meme?

No. It's actually a pretty good book, but it isn't geared towards beginners.

but people recommend it to beginners regularly

What is even the definition of a meme at this point?

The C Programming Language is a great book. Yes, it is mildly dated and you might be too dense to be able to make sense of it. Does that make it a meme for you, brainlet?

It's doable as a beginner but it requires a lot of work. It's like starting to learn to swim in deep water. Doable but not pleasant.

if you cant swim it doesnt matter if the water is 2 meters or 2000 meters deep

If they're learning C as a first language then this book shouldn't be recommended.

If they already know another language and want to learn what C is all about then this book should be recommended and they shouldn't waste their time with anything else.

Its fine for a beginner if you have prior programming experience. In that sense its for C beginners but not necessarily programming beginners.

Sort of... I fell for the meme myself years ago

The book is from 1989, and the last stable version of C (C11) was released in 2011, also there are tons of tutorials and documentation online, and even books that cover the latest release if you really prefer physical books

If you really wanted to learn C, you would be googling furiously and writing shitty code that blows up every 2 seconds instead of posting on Sup Forums

Mediocre book worded in extremely annoying manner.

Aside from that
>2017
>ANSI C
Don't be so retarded, please

>comparing the level of learning he would get from two Bell Labs OGs with what he gets from reading shitty online tutorials written by skids or NEETs
Enjoy your bad practices and your unmaintainable, inelegant code, pajeet.

I got this one for free from my uni library, looks interesting

I forgive you for your stupid post because you're probably just a kid

>Bad practices
But you name none

>Unmaintainable code
But you don't explain what that means

>Inelegant code
But you give no examples

Your "opinion" is literally a waste of everyone's time on this board, you did not help me, you did not help OP, you provided nothing constructive, and only showed what an immature retard you are by calling me a pajeet.

You are the cancer that is killing Sup Forums, please leave or stop posting immediately.

Dennis and Brian are not deities to be worshiped, anyone can learn C, and I bet my left nut there are tons of people out there who know C better than both of these people. Also Dennis is dead, may he rest in peace.

From what I've gathered, if c is my first language, this book is doable but not optimal. What's a good book for an absolute noob?

Are you retarded? You usually learn how to swim in shallow water where you can stand up and keep your head above water.

asking if things are a meme is a meme

really makes you think

>anyone can learn C
Fuck off. You're a fucking millennial idiot who thinks anyone can learn anything by reading random tutorials on the internet.

If you want an example of atrocious code, post a snippet of what you're on and I'll give you one. Are you even working on anything, or did you just come here to shitpost about a subject you're just starting to learn and have no fucking clue about? Lurk the fuck more you little triggered pajeet little bitch.

Actually that's not true at all. If you learn to swim where you can not stand up, it forces you to use the right muscles right off the bat.

It's actually easier to learn how to swim that way, that's why babies are really good at swimming : they can't stand up yet so they can't rely on what is, in the swimming paradigm, a bad practice.

CS50.

> IT'S CURRENT YEAR
> WHY USE SUCH OUTDATED SHIT?
> EMBRACE THE MODERN APPROACH

kys

Yes it is a meme in the C programming circle, but its just an intro only faggots take it as holy.

struct neuron_cell* create_neuron_cell(struct neuron* head, \
struct neuron_cell* arg) {
void** argv; // we need to pass both head and arg to our thread
void* buffer = &argv;
int thread_buffer;
struct neuron_cell* this = arg = (struct neuron_cell*)malloc(sizeof(struct neuron_cell));
if(this != NULL) {
if(head != NULL) {
argv[0] = (void*) this;
argv[1] = (void*) head;

if(thread_buffer = pthread_create(&this->thread, \
NULL, init_neuron_cell, buffer)) {
printf("Error[5]: Cannot Spawn Neuron Cell");
exit(-1);
} else {
return this;
}
} else {
printf("Error 6: No Head on Cell");
}
}
}

>printing error messages to stdout instead of stderr
>cuts some of the lines while letting others go way above 80 characters
>C++ style comments
>neuron_cell*, neuron*, void**, void*
>(struct neuron_cell*)malloc
>if(expression)
> } else {

Thanks for proving my point so fucking hard.

Hahahahaha thanks for proving my point

Yes the internet is filled with excellent material for learning C or really any language you like. To say otherwise only shows what an uneducated ignoramus you are.

Oh and for the record, I've been working as a programmer since my 3rd year in college, which was 6 years ago.

Do you know how I learned how to do linked lists in C++? By staying up late to 6 AM working on a console dictionary application. The code was horribly messy but it worked and there were no memory leaks or bugs to be found. I didn't even need a book.

You're just a pretentious kid who thinks he knows it all, and your opinion is harmful to anyone who actually wants to learn.

It's more of a reference than anything else.
Read it once you know the basics of C

Not me, that was some other guy

>Complaining about comments and character count
Wow, fuck off you useless piece of shit

>C++ style comments
These are honestly the best thing C++ brought about, what is your issue with them?

>Hahahahaha thanks for proving my point
You just proved it so hard though. I said that by learning your stuff from random online tutorials you'll cultivate bad practices and produce awful code and what did you present me, if not just that? And then you proceed to prove my point even further:

>"The code was horribly messy but it worked and there were no memory leaks or bugs to be found."
>a.k.a. code is messy and literally no developer would like to touch this shit with a 10-foot pole even though they'll have to eventually but hey, at least it werks right?
I'm glad I'll never work with dumb pajeets like you.

I was in school, still a baby programmer, that's why it was messy, and I did not post that code, it was somebody else.

You talk about bad code and bad practices, but mention none, you think you know it all, but actually know very little, but you have a very loud mouth, and insult anyone who doesn't do things exactly the way you do them, and complain about every little detail in code.

>I'm glad I'll never work with dumb pajeets like you.
Right back at ya buddy, then again I'm pretty sure you don't even have a job

C++ comments are fine in C++ because every compiler will understand them. That, however, is not the case with C and should someone decide to compile your source code by themselves they won't enjoy the fact that they can't compile because of COMMENTS.

I wonder how this little detail escaped all the "expert" programmers ITT.

Yes, nowadays it's a meme. It's very outdated.

I agree. I own this book and it sucks for beginers. The examples on pointers is pretty fucking vague.

It only touches on certain things without explaning them in depth, It's an antiquated book that really has no relevance anymore.

It certainly is a meme. In fact, it's one of the biggest meme books out there.

Outdated and completely lacking detail.
C Primer Plus is what you should get.

>its just an intro only faggots take it as holy.
basically this

comments are for people who don't understand what they're doing, C programmers understand what they're doing.

No, my first languages were LISP and Haskell, so I was expecting learning a language with a substantially different paradigm to be very difficult; but the book is very easy to understand and thus made learning C rather easy. Similarities to do notation in Haskell also helped a lot with the early reading.

Essential book for essential programming language. Good for beginners and not only.

top wew la

I hate this brainlet meme. I refuse to believe you never struggled and felt like giving up 'cause something was hard. Stop being an egofag.

>Struggling with an introductory book
I'm so sorry

I lost and I don't know why

It's not a meme but it's written in incomprehensible way. Just as if the writer just states and spits out his own "facts". Almost trash.

>That, however, is not the case with C
a) C++ style comments were brought with C99.
b) Many compilers supported them before.
Where's your God now?

> is this book a meme?

No, it's a good, clearly-written book. I myself learned C from it.

The big "meme" book on Sup Forums is SICP. There a small number of people who rave about the book and say things like "It totally turned my head inside out and changed the way I think about solving problems with code" -- but for most people it's just hard, dense, frustrating, and its use of Scheme isn't a good choice for the more practical-minded who would rather focus on a more popular language.

No
Honestly it's the best book for beginners, bigger books are fluff and treat you like an idiot. I wish all computer books were like K&R.

i'm liking the two i'm reading now. c for dummies, and c primer plus. i'll follow one until it introduces something new, then switch over to the other one and do that for a while, then back again
suggestions for a third or more book to start too? i've got the gentoomen library

Online tutorials are shit, they are just training material for code monkeys.

There is a reason they are given for free. It's either coding bootcamp scammers or made by egoistic trolls on ego trips. In either case they treat programming languages as the ultimate goal and ignore that programming languages are just a way to express mathematical ideas and algorithms in a way a computer can execute them.

The good knowledge exists in libraries, use them, online books and online knowledge bases are mostly shit and biased.

No.

The book does not hold your hand and throw hard problems from the start. In fact the first chapter of the book was the entire programming 101 course in my crappy university.

I own the first edition and it's still relevant. C is a small programming language and all the changes with the standards C99 and C11 can be learn in a sunny afternoon.

Final Tip: you can learn C in a week max but to truly master it you might take a lifetime.

C is not going anywhere any time soon. It is the de facto systems programming language. it's like saying math is a meme or english is a meme. maybe one day machines, ai and software will do most of our work for us. but as for right now, we have C.

Your book OP will keep you virgin neckbeard.
My book (pic. related) makes me a winner in life.

yeah, we got this on Programming 101. Professor told us to just throw it away.

Is this book a meme?

Yes

Yes.

It is of considerable historical interest, but newcomers to programming C don't know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

The very first hello world example omits the return type of the main function and omits the explicit return. Implicit int is technically confirming, but if you submitted code like that to code review I would throttle you. A missing return value is undefined even by C89 standards, though thankfully they finally start around page 40.

It gets worse. As you keep going, you'll realize that the style of C K&R writes tends to be terse, cryptic and too clever by half. You are not K&R. Even if you are K&R, other people who follow you and have to maintain the code you write might not be K&R and might not realize the full depth of the cleverness.

That's really the brunt of why I would never recommend K&R to anybody except other seasoned programmers as a historical curiosity only. It also doesn't help that its view of the C standard library is stuck in the 80's and now we have safer alternatives.

What is the point of the backslashes in the arguments for create_neuron_cell and pthread_create?

>agile software

prepare your anus for some pajeet going in depth on way making your shitty OO code ever more abstract and shitty will somehow make it better.

The book isn't. The language is.

>and its use of Scheme isn't a good choice for the more practical-minded who would rather focus on a more popular language.
brainlet detected.

You do realize the use of a non homoiconic syntax would render an entire chapter of the book irrelevant right? Did you even read it?

Why do you have arg as an argument to create_neuron_cell at all if you just reassign it in this statement?
struct neuron_cell* this = arg = (struct neuron_cell*)malloc(sizeof(struct neuron_cell));

there is no point. stop reading that code, it's stupid.

>you should not strive to perfect your craft and write small and elegant code because the people around you might be too stupid to understand what it does
There's a reason why comments exist, fuckwad. If you read a well-commented snippet of code and yet it still flies completely over your head, then you're a fucking idiot who doesn't fully understand the inner workings of the language that is being used, and as such you should stay the fuck away from others people code until you're competent enough to maintain it.