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40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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lifthrasiironJune 23, 2021

Unfortunately, there are not a single but a multitude of cultures within the C programming community that compete with others, most of them claiming they are safer than others.

The aforementioned list for example has Jed Shaw's Learn C The Hard Way as having "[t]oo many factual problems and a presentation that gets you to do things wrongly before being shown how to do it correctly, and not even always then". This is an opinion held by the ##c channel, not necessarily every (competent) C programmer. LCTHW itself did a great service by introducing valgrind very early, and most criticisms [1] seem to be presentation issues that might be partly necessary for beginners and partly a matter of taste. (I personally think LCTHW was in particular unfairly attacked because of its merciless treatment of K&R. It's a shame that Jed Shaw gave up then.) To this date I don't have any good beginner-level C book to recommend, including K&R.

[1] as judged by famous Don't Learn C the Wrong Way essay by Tim Hentenaar: http://hentenaar.com/dont-learn-c-the-wrong-way

tialaramexonMay 15, 2021

K&R is excellent. One of the things that makes it stand out would be almost irrelevant today, it has an excellent hand-made index. If you're wondering about, say, arithmetic conversions, the index gets you straight to the page which lists exactly what you needed. Wondering when to pick enum over #define? Again, the index has your back.

Today online you've got full text search, maybe you find two, three hits that are irrelevant, but it's so cheap you barely care. And in a book today the index is probably auto-generated (hiring somebody to write an index is not a thing these days) and so it's almost useless with dozens of irrelevant entries, but hey, like I said, full text search, so who cares?

Because C is such a small language and it was essentially finished when the book was written, they get to do a pretty complete survey while also teaching you, so you read the book once, now you understand C pretty well. The Rust book is much better than C++ books I tried, but because Rust is still immature there are big sections that are being rewritten or have already been rewritten, and of course the whole book can't be reordered and started over each time, so overall it's uneven.

I am reluctant to buy a printed Rust book because of that immaturity. My (second edition) K&R is still a pretty good survey of the language. Are there things it doesn't cover? Yes. But few of them are fundamental, whereas I feel like if I bought a Rust book today, in five years it's a historical curiosity like my Stroustrup, except hopefully better written. I still consult my K&R a few times a year, I don't even know where the books I own on other languages (including the long obsolete Stroustrup) are, I might not have unpacked them after moving years ago.

tarkin2onApr 4, 2021

* NAND2Tetris - https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Teaches you how computers, languages and operating systems work from basic principles

* Little Schemer, Seasoned Schemer

Teaches you about the power of functions, recursion, various CS topics and lisp's syntax

* K&R C Programming Language

Teaches you about lower-level programming

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