The Little Book of C

I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.

The author is right about C leading to better understanding of computers, OSes and other languages.

For me a breakthrough moment was when I saw my C code interleaved with the generated assembly. Registers, calling conventions, calling OS functions…all laid bare!

I wonder how many hallucinated wrong facts are in there. It looked like a good resource until I learned its LLM generated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45479268

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448525

Another very fine online reference for someone new to C is Beej's Guide to C Programming: https://beej.us/guide/bgc/

(Here is a reference to K&R, the standard first reference to C, because I am obligated to make such a reference.)

The fact that it's AI generated is simultaneously thrilling and frightening. Especially considering that some AI Agents might be trained on that.

Wish they had this for zig

Ai is getting really good. I can’t tell the difference anymore.