Teaching C (2016)

C development, like most languages, isn't really "taught" at all. You might have some teaching on the structure of the language and a basic getting started course on main(), but that's just the beginning. Everything from there up seems to be self-taught, either from the internet, code examples, or working it out from first principles. There are a lot more risks in C than more recent languages. Koenig's book "C Traps And Pitfalls" https://www.amazon.co.uk/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0... was extremely useful…

A few good C books have come out in the time since this article was first published, 2016. https://nostarch.com/Effective_C https://www.packtpub.com/free-ebook/extreme-c/9781789343625 https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fluent-c/9781492097273

RMS recently released reference manual for GNU C - I am finding it to be direct and succinct. Edit: I used to teach C to a group of undergrads and one question that came up often was around the special significance of the main function and order of definition of functions. The RMS book addresses this very succinctly - Every C program is started by running the function named main. Therefore, the example program defines a function named main to…