A little while ago I read another of Traister’s C books, Programming in C for the microcomputer user. It’s equally as bad with respect to understanding C. In fact, it provides more evidence to support my hypothesis that he doesn’t understand the concept of the call stack. It’s also filled with awful examples of C programs that you should not learn from.
For example, here’s how he introduces loops in C (pages 38-39 in the book).
main()
{
int x;
QRP:
x = 5;
printf("%d\n", x);
goto QRP;
}
I remember seeing this title in bookstores. I was always curious about it, because it’s definitely a topic that deserve extra attention from newcomers to the language. I never bought it, though, since I had by then already undergone my own trial-by-fire with learning C pointers. Now I wish I had – I wonder how long it would have taken me to realize just how bad the book was.
A little while ago I read another of Traister’s C books, Programming in C for the microcomputer user. It’s equally as bad with respect to understanding C. In fact, it provides more evidence to support my hypothesis that he doesn’t understand the concept of the call stack. It’s also filled with awful examples of C programs that you should not learn from.
For example, here’s how he introduces loops in C (pages 38-39 in the book).
I remember seeing this title in bookstores. I was always curious about it, because it’s definitely a topic that deserve extra attention from newcomers to the language. I never bought it, though, since I had by then already undergone my own trial-by-fire with learning C pointers. Now I wish I had – I wonder how long it would have taken me to realize just how bad the book was.
https://lobste.rs/s/qjxprt/massacring_c_pointers
I guess a resubmit of this was inevitable…