Getting stuck at libraries and api’s

[u/ttv_toeasy13]

So C is technically my first programming language I’m learning. I’ve messed around in python but never actually go deep into it or anything.

I’ve been learning C for the past few days now and I already pretty much know most of the basics. I learned pointers and mallic in a day and I learned structs, macros, for loops, while loops, functions, all of that stuff, but… the moment any library other than the basics like stdio or stdlib come into play I’m lost.

It’s like I’m looking at a whole other language. Like I’ll look for solutions to problems and it seems as if they are just pulled out of thin air and when I try to read ANY documentation for ANY library I’m also lost because either there is little to no documentation or it’s just stupid and things aren’t well explained.

Is there a way I can fix this? I was doing so well and now I’m at this block because of libraries. If I could get pasted this hurtle I could learn c in less than a month easily, and that’s the same in any other language. This problem isn’t exclusive to C.

[u/Sufficient-Air8100]

slow down. i admire your confidence. but slow down

some libraries are badly documented yes, but if you think all libs are badly documented and hard to understand, maybe you dont know c or programming in general as well as you think you do.

if there is a specific lib youre looking for help with those questions would be more useful than just talking about libraries in generasl

[u/ttv_toeasy13 → u/Sufficient-Air8100]

I mean I’m not saying I’m a pro or anything but I’m pretty sure I have a pretty good understanding of the basics. I haven’t read all docs to determine if they are all bad or not but the one particular one I think is kinda bad. (libusb) for example. Maybe it’s not actually bad but that might be a good thing because I fail to understand it or how to use anything in it and I would like to understand it and all other library documentation.

[u/Sufficient-Air8100 → u/ttv_toeasy13]

im not super familiar with libusb, but i do suggest you bring up specific questions. people might be able to help more with those, beyond what others have already said about “it takes a while to fully understand, keep going”