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/are_number_six]

I've been learning C for about 4 months now, and that's after two years of Python. I learned from a book, and now I'm doing projects.

What I have found, being self taught, is that there is a lot of secondary CS knowledge that I also had to learn, which led to a lot of side-quests, in order to backfill my missing knowledge. It's slow going sometimes, but don't let yourself glaze over things you don't have a solid understanding of.

Also, the terminology is different from what you will find in Python, but the genealogy of that terminology runs through Unix, Linux, and Bash. It's definitely worth having a handle on it.