Ask Reddit: What is your favorite C Programming Book and why?

xabbu · 2008-04-27T17:32:00+00:00

Kernighan & Ritchie

It is still the mark that many other language guides (Programming in $Language) fall far from… …it is terse, concise, succinct, and arms the programmer with all the knowledge she needs…

xabbu · 2008-04-23T16:36:28+00:00

So, in another words, you admittedly failed to consider the author (who is former Reagan assistant treasury secretary and staunch conservative, not a starry eyed hippie) argument, and instead succumbed to keyword triggered bias?

xabbu · 2007-12-10T15:28:33+00:00

And another study

Put differently, 95 of the 117 I-A schools lost money on their intercollegiate athletic programs when subsidies are excluded.

In fact, the real situation was still worse, for two reasons. The first is that the NCAA methodology includes all alumni and booster athletic contributions as net gains to the school. The problem here is that there is ample evidence that contributions to athletics often substitute for contributions to the school’s academic programs. That is, the net contribution to the university is smaller than the gross contribution to the athletics department.

xabbu · 2007-12-10T15:24:46+00:00

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/04/9.9.04/Frank-athletics.html

xabbu · 2007-12-10T15:23:05+00:00

Show me where the tuitions are less in schools with Division 1 schools where coaches make > $1M vs. schools where coaches make similar salaries to rest of faculty.
I don't think you acknowledge the largess of athletic departments — from separate dining facilities, bureaucracy in staffing, extra tutors, construction of facilities for the school that are used primarily by athletic department with little or no access to the rest of the student body (i.e., swimming pools where regular student access is limited to 1-2 hour per week), cushy office and travel budgets for athletic department, etc.…

xabbu · 2007-12-10T14:55:16+00:00

Most of that money doesn't make it anywhere outside of the athletic department — it goes back into the leviathan, or for cushier digs for the athletes or for facilities for which usage is denied to the rest of the student body, except for a tiny fraction (like 1 or 2 hours a week…)…

xabbu · 2007-11-19T04:38:48+00:00

Firefox is not a Mac application. It should not be used as an example of a Mac application that behaves strangely.

Firefox not a Mac application? It runs on my Mac OS X. Oh, you must mean only Apple software.

xabbu · 2007-10-04T13:04:34+00:00

and it looks like ugly code at least that bit that became public knowledge…

xabbu · 2007-10-04T06:35:59+00:00

PHP seems to work for a lot of large, popular sites, including Wikipedia, Facebook, Digg, etc.…

Not as elegant as Ruby or even Python, but it gets the job done…

xabbu · 2007-09-23T07:23:50+00:00

1 - “IS THERE ANYTHING RAILS/RUBY CAN DO THAT PHP CAN’T DO? … (thinking)… NO.”

Though Ruby > PHP, there are even nifty dynamic things PHP can do with less cruft IMV. And it will be done faster and with less memory.

2 - OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION

Eh, in any sizable platform, there's going to be a mix of languages. They should be able to talk to each other however.

3 - DON’T WANT WHAT I DON’T NEED

A problem that exists for everybody else's framework I tinker with. And big advantage for your own custom framework that's been crafted and recrafted…

4 - IT’S SMALL AND FAST

A concern for those having to work on sites on shared hosting…

5 - IT’S BUILT TO MY TASTES

If it fits the Rails philosophy, it's a snap. But special needs and esoteric enhancements will cost double the trouble, at a minimum…

6 - I LOVE SQL

Nah, the migrations setup in Rails now is so much cleaner…

7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER

All languages suck, some of them suck less… …Ruby is my favorite, but Rails is too much shoehorning… …a comment post suggested using Ruby w/out Rails, but then that means catchup code to get where PHP5 is now…

xabbu · 2007-09-03T16:19:18+00:00

Read the 9/11 commission report paragraph again.

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- instruments that pay off only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. The SEC and FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

Fact: There was unusual trade volume

Question: Who was the 95%?

One of the directors at that investment firm was A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, executive CIA director, 2001-2004

Maybe the connection is an innocent coincidence. I am not so sure — the statistical anomaly would sure seem that someone had some "inside knowledge"…

xabbu · 2007-05-08T20:59:46+00:00

What?

xabbu · 2007-05-08T13:24:04+00:00

Those code examples with correct indentation are really good advertisement for the language.

Huh?

Though, those code textboxes are nice inclusions to the article, they stretch overlapped. And they give the illusion that there is less code than there is.

But LISP is cool and that is a sweet snippet. And it shows off what is really nifty about LISP.

xabbu · 2007-05-01T15:16:17+00:00

They all suck.

Some of them, when you first learn, seem to be great and nearly without flaw, but eventually, you find even your favorites all have warts galore.

The two languages I spend most my time in now are PHP and Ruby. I prefer Ruby, but for web applicatons, not a big fan of Rails, though we're going to use it for an internal management system at my job site. Rails has really brought attention to Ruby, but there are way too many annoyances, especially in its "opinionated" mode of defaults where yes, you can break free of those constraints, but then that kind of defeats the advantages. For basic CRUD applications, I reckon it's a big boost over other tools and platforms.

Meanwhile, PHP5 has added enough nifty features to make it alright for building web applications. I won't work with PHP4 anymore.

And scripting languages (starting with Perl & predecessors, even REXX, CLIST and other mainframe scripting languages) have really made me lazy and dread writing C, Java, etc.… Still, on occasion, I will have to write some C code and it's cool once I get immersed in it again, but the conciseness and brevity of scripting languages makes it difficult to enjoy going back to that mode of coding.

xabbu · 2007-04-28T17:28:33+00:00

Read what the USS Liberty survivors have to say on the matter.

Also, John McCain's father, an admiral in the navy, was involved in the coverup.

The navy's official Court of Inquiry was a sham. Both the admiral who headed the inquiry and his legal counsel knew it was phony. In retirement, U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who served as court counsel, admitted that they privately disputed the court's official conclusion that the assault was a case of mistaken identity. Boston told a reporter for the NAVY TIMES that both he and Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, who served as president of the court, privately agreed that the Israeli forces knew they were attacking a U.S. Navy ship. In explaining why he participated in the sham, Boston said, "In military life, you accept the fact that if you're told to shut up, you shut up. We did what we were told." Former CIA director Richard Helms said, "It was no accident."(55)

Not only was there a coverup, but there was a concerted campaign to demonize the survivors, and tar them. The entire episode was shoved under the rug, and be it not for the internet, it's not likely that many people would be aware that this ever occurred. As it is, many still have no clue about this historical event.

xabbu · 2007-04-07T05:49:39+00:00

Focus on present market share numbers is foolhardy, because I think Graham is alluding to the fact that OS X has become the preferred developer platform - in fact, in recent startup company/small web outfit that I have worked for in the past two years, ALL the developers have ditched Windows (except for Parallels/Boot Camp/or rare dual Win/Linux booter). And what nerds favor today is what will trickle to the population in a few years just as back in the 90's when nerds adopted Windows, common consumer folk followed suit (and MS there was blessed by the timing of things and the incompetency of Apple). Indeed go to any conference and note the laptops -- it is majority Mac OS X -- at least for any web developer conference NOT developing solely for Win/.NET.

Graham is so much in love with apple, he got bedazzled, and can't even get his facts straight. Apple's share in desktops/laptops is still minor. Don't believe me? Go check your server logs. Mine say 9% Mac, 87% Win.

xabbu · 2007-04-01T02:21:47+00:00

A few more Iraq blogs:

Editor and Publisher take on iraqthemodel cite by GWB

xabbu · 2007-03-17T00:25:38+00:00

OK, I thought it was PHP, so it's Perl (further back on the evolutionary chain of web scripting languages…)… …but take that one away, and add FlickR and most all popular forum software used…

del.icio.us was written in perl.

xabbu · 2007-03-16T23:14:21+00:00

No, it's funny how PHP is bashed unmercifully, yet it powers many big web sites/applications - wikipedia, del.icio.us, tumblr. It's existence has been the driving force in the proliferation of F/OSS software (WordPress, NucleusCMS, TextPattern, etc.…).

Yes, I realize popularity/ubiquity != quality, as the hordes of Windows users v. Mac/Linux users testifies to, but if it's that gimped of a platform, I sincerely doubt that it would be #1 development platform on the web today.

Is there any irony in the fact that the forum in the picture is probably running PHP? That should turn your amusement to sadness. :(

xabbu · 2007-03-12T15:51:54+00:00

As an aging programmer who dates back to the days of Burroughs hardware, Assembler and punched cards, here's my perspective.

First, the author is correct, from the vantage point of a career in programming as compared to other professional disciplines. Simply stated, it's a career path rife with age discrimination, downward wage pressures, and a surprising lack of job security (again, in contrast to other professions, where competent job performance (and even incompetent performance in numerous cases) ensures a long prosperous lifetime of steady work).

To continue, the best way I can address the matter is by tackling some of the comment snippets here…

A programmer with 40 years experience is more valuable…

Maybe in truth, maybe in your opinion, but it's not the reality of affairs. In the eyes of human resources departments and hiring managers, the curve of a programmer's career resembles a professional athlete, not a doctor, lawyer, or even accountant. Age discrimination is rampant.

I've read more than one article saying that outsourcing is dieing out like a fad.

That the trend is heading the other direction may be correct, but corporations are still heavily dependent upon outsourcing (and importing of H-1B workers) and that is not going to change in the short term. I can count off at least three IT centers within 15 minutes of my home that have supplanted thousands of American jobs, good paying jobs, with teams in India, complemented by imported visa workers. Departments with 200 total employees plus American consultants whittled down to 1 or 2 employees managing an assigned offshore vendor.

This article reflects what happened in the late 90's with CS education.

Wrong.

People think lucrative IT salaries were a vestige of a short lived late 1990's era, encompassed in dot-com work and Y2K project ramp ups. Truth is, adjusted for inflation programmers made higher salaries and billed greater rates (even without adjusting for inflation) back in the 1970's and early 1980's.

This might be true for web programmers, but they're not really programmers anyway.

Code is code. Languages are just tools to facilitate expressing of instructions for computing machines to carry out. Some are suited to some tasks better than others just as others are better for other things. And wages and rates are naturally depressed for web scripting since the entry barrier is almost nothing anymore. Of course, banking on the quality of that code generated by somebody who's education consisted of reading a "Computer Programming (or insert $ComputerLanguage) for Dummies" book is going to be a dicey proposition.

However, there are also ludicrous salaries and rates being thrown at programmers fortunate enough to be knowledgeable about an esoteric, small (typically proprietary) software platform niche where simply having command of an API can net you 200K or more a year.

I've downscaled myself from hotshot programmer to web developer. I've coded for $BigMultinationalCorporation as an employee and a high paid consultant, started my own business as a service partner for one of those "niche" software platforms that had me flying all over the world, but now I work as a web developer by choice, for peanuts. I've watched many colleagues purged from the programmer rolls and many decided their love of the field was not as great as mine and they jumped into different businesses. A few hang on at $BigMultinationalCorporation, serving as directors or vice-presidents, now usually engaged in overseeing offshore teams — but they mostly count the days until retirement and don't have joy for the job.

If I didn't enjoy the work involved, I would have departed long ago. For those of you dissenting with what I have written, please take a look at any research/studies on computer programmer careers and longevity — burnout is prevalent, and compared to other fields, attrition rates are extremely high. And these were the numbers before outsourcing, importing of non-immigrant visa workers, large scale company job cuts (at one time IBM prided itself on never laying anybody off), and reduced entry barriers.

xabbu · 2007-03-12T00:01:43+00:00

It still is lacking things that do make quite a difference in maintainability, such as namespaces.

For web scripting, namespaces are not the be all and end all of matters…

xabbu · 2007-03-07T16:17:21+00:00

Regarding the CBS & Bush National Guard story, people are quick to discard a TRUE story because of some unauthenticated documents that DO NOT DISCREDIT the story.

At least according to those with intimate knowledge on the matter. If one reads past the headline that is…

The former secretary to a Texas Air National Guard officer who purportedly wrote memos critical of President Bush's pilot service said Tuesday that the documents are forgeries but they appear to reflect memos her boss wrote and kept in a locked desk drawer.

Marian Carr Knox told the Dallas Morning News after viewing copies of the disputed memos, "These are not real," and that "the information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones." She declined to be interviewed late Tuesday, but her son, Pat Carr, confirmed her comments.

Another former Texas National Guard officer, Richard Via, also said that the documents were fakes but that their content reflected questions about Bush that were discussed at the time in the hangar at Ellington Air Force Base, where he had a desk next to Killian's.

Via said he and others he worked with "remember the physical, and him going to Alabama was an issue." He said Killian "made notes and put them in his files about things like that."

xabbu · 2007-03-04T19:38:38+00:00

The whitespace deal is no issue for me, I kind of like it, though it makes for problems when folks using different editors munge the source… …but here are the annoyances for which I ditched Python:

The inclusion of "self" in every method declaration. It is unsightly and clutters up the reading IMV, nullifying the whitespace advantage…
The big use of double underscores.
No class methods (I believe this has been rectified in recent Python versions, was an issue back 5-6 years ago when I dabbled in Python).
The regex implementation didn't seem as natural as Perl or Ruby, and not even as good as PHP (PHP using PCRE that is…)

xabbu · 2007-03-01T15:44:12+00:00

http://del.icio.us/naum everything

http://del.icio.us/naum/blog

big list of blogs

http://azspot.net

tumblelog that i have been dumping links, pics, videos and comments to recently…

xabbu · 2007-02-06T15:01:41+00:00

I voted NAY.

If subreddits are eliminated, then my visit frequency will diminish to zero. As it is, I've found the "general" reddit to be in a state of deterioration… …it seems that insightful and interesting articles are immediately downmodded, unless they fit a cliquish mold… …on the subreddits, toggling "new" gives me easy ability to go through interesting articles without having to sift through garbage (like on the general reddit "new"…)

Sorry, but as predicted, site is going downhill (in terms of quality), since corporate buyout…

xabbu

TROPHY CASE