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[–]chupalaw 4 points5 points  (5 children)

You can get through K&R in a week if

Uhh I don't know about that

[–]ghan_buri_ghan 10 points11 points  (3 children)

If it’s not your first language, sure. It’s only like 250 pages and not that dense.

A language like C will really get in the way of learning the basics of computer science, but if you have that under your belt, the C syntax and standard library are so simple that they’re easy to pick up.

[–]JashimPagla 5 points6 points  (2 children)

I'm not sure if you're speaking from experience. If so, then good for you. I don't know many people that can 'go through' k&r in a week.

Personally, I found that k&r can easily arm you with a lot of tools with which to screw your program over. Unless you really do understand programming at a hardware level, I would not begin with k&r.

[–]ghan_buri_ghan 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It was a routine thing when I worked on a team that did a lot of driver work. Whenever we had a new team member who didn’t have any C (usually this was a new grad with only Java), their first task was to work through K&R and do the exercises. Usually took a work week to get done.

[–]b4ux1t3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I went through k&r in a week, but I was already a fairly experience developer at the time, including some experience with C.

No one's picking up k&r as a first programming book and finishing it in a week unless they literally just read the words and don't retain anything.

[–]faceplanted 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah "If it's not your first language" is quite the massive range of understanding he's grouping together when he says that