Name: Learn C the hard way
ISBN: 9780321884923

Learn C the hard way

You Will Learn C! Zed Shaw has perfected the world's best system for learning C. Follow it and you will succeed-just like the hundreds of thousands of programmers Zed has taught to date! You bring discipline, commitment, persistence, and experience with any programming language; the author supplies everything else. In Learn C the Hard Way, you'll learn C by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Watch Zed Shaw's teaching video. Type his code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you'll learn what good modern C programs look like, how to think more effectively about code, and how to find and fix mistakes far more efficiently. Most importantly, you'll master rigorous defensive programming techniques, so you can use any language to create software that defends itself from malicious activity and defects. Shaw teaches all the key skills you need to start writing excellent C software: Planning and attention to detail Setting up a C environment Basic syntax and idioms Compilation, make files, and linkers Operators, variables, and data types Program control Arrays and strings Functions, pointers, and structs Memory allocation I/O and files Libraries Data structures, including linked lists, sort, and search Stacks and queues Debugging, defensive coding, and automated testing Fixing stack overflows, illegal memory access, and more It'll Be Hard At First. But Soon, You'll Just Get It-And That Will Feel Great!

What Hacker News says

davidwfMar 2025

I highly recommend Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way": https://learncodethehardway.org/c/

I worked through this and felt well-prepared to actually use C in anger when I had to.

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romwellJul 2024

I can vouch for "Learn C The Hard Way" as well :)

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borlancoDec 2023

That's easy. After learning the language, study good C code. Try to grok how the masters build higher-level abstractions.

Learn from widely used C code that is not a toy. Examples: sqlite.org, git-scm.org

If you don't understand something, look it up in the C standard doc.

Most of the time, you will want to program for speed, and C will let you. Learn and practice C profiling.

Also, you will need to learn defensive programming. The best source about this is "Learn C The Hard Way" by Zed Shaw: https://github.com/zedshaw/learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures

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rubyskillsOct 2022

I really enjoyed "Learn C The Hard Way" by Zed Shaw. His style of learning resonates with me.

https://learncodethehardway.org/c/

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suprjamiSep 2022

This is one of the tips given in Zed Shaw's "Learn C The Hard Way". I've also found it invaluable, and make my mentees do the same thing.

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sillyinseattleMar 2022

Zed Shaw's "Learn C the hard way". Had years of scientific programming before that (R, Matlab). But I used to be afraid of working with "real" code bases. This book (which still has an unfinished feel to it) helped me understand how computers work and how to write programs with that understanding - at a high level. Learning about "Object-oriented programming" with plain C was super fun. Not the most illuminating book I've read (e.g. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee), but the others did not change my life.

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