From: John Joyce Date: 2007-10-01T11:02:25+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] Confession: I never did ASM On Sep 30, 2007, at 4:22 PM, Chad Perrin wrote: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 03:29:34AM +0900, Michael Bevilacqua-Linn > wrote: >> Programming From The Ground Up - An Introduction to Programming >> using Linux >> Assembly Language is quite good. >> >> But if you're looking to start programming in C, why not just start >> programming in C? >> >> I've always liked the O'Reilly Practical C book and, of course, The C >> Programming Language (K&R) is a classic and well worth the read. >> And I seem >> to have lost my copy :-/ > > By "the O'Reilly Practical C book" -- do you mean "Practical C > Programming" by Steve Oualline? I just got that book a month or > two ago, > and haven't had much time to get into it, but it looks good so > far. Some > people I've talked to about it didn't seem to think much of it, but > they're developing a new open source C compiler and seem to be the > "K&R > is all you need" type, so I figure I should probably take their > opinion > of it with a grain of salt. If anyone else has any thoughts, > though, I'd > be happy to hear them (especially if those thoughts involve some > specific > things to watch out for while I'm reading the book so I won't be led > astray). > > -- > CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] > Rudy Giuliani: "You have free speech so I can be heard." > there are unfortunately far too many of those "K&R is all you need" types out there. Oualine's book is excellent. It doesn't cover everything, but he's a good writer. (rare in C books) My two cents, in general the OREILLY Cookbooks are good places to learn and get ideas on how to do stuff. Many of the snippets and solutions in them are from different people in one place. You don't need only the Ruby / Rails ones either! The PHP Cookbook is quite a good one for reference on web programming concepts. The Perl and Python cookbooks are of course good. All of that series is well worth it, and many things are easily adaptable from one language to another. Same goes for those looking int Qt or Tk libraries. The books on these are usually good, but it's all in C or C++ usually, so you will have to adapt it to use with Ruby, but still useful.