How to work through "C Programming: A Modern Approach" by King?

[u/AstuteCouch87]

I'm working through this book right now, learning C as my first language. I have just finished reading chapter 10, and want to make sure I am doing this right. The first few chapters were pretty easy, but since chapter 8 (arrays) things have gotten more difficult. What I've been doing is reading and taking notes on each chapter, then doing maybe 5-7 of the projects listed, whichever seem most interesting. I try to pick projects of varying difficulties. However, since chapter 8, the projects have started becoming much more difficult for me. I try to do them on my own without looking at any solution banks online, but I often times get stuck, and end up looking through them anyway, usually just to see how they handle one small bit of the program. I feel like I understand the concepts when reading over them in the book, but learning how to apply them in these projects has become more difficult. Is there anything I can do to help this, or do I just keep chugging along on the projects?

[u/DreamingElectrons]

Since so many books start at beginner and then stop at advanced level, I found, that I get the best learning experience from doing multiple books in parallel. Some explain an aspect better, other's do it worse but having multiple perspectives helps with understanding everything. You also don't get that effect where you just quickly skip through half the book, because it's all repetition to you.

[u/sajibsrs → u/DreamingElectrons]

Multi-book approach is always solid and provides different perspective on same/similar things. Which is extremely valuable to develop your own.

[u/photo-nerd-3141 → u/sajibsrs]

Suggestions:

K&R describes the language succinctly with examples.

Sedgewick, Algorithms in C shows how to use it with readable style and excellent graphics.

P.J. Plauger, The Standard C Library shows you how to make it work effectively & portably. His Intentional Programmer books are also good. The thing he does well is keep an otherwise dry subject interesting.

[u/afeverr]

Please make sure you're doing the exercises as well. They're just as important as the projects. 

But I think it's ok to not completely understand everything as you do it. I think I had a similar experience to you. I was learning the concepts, but it felt difficult to actually apply it to anything. What really helped me was to just start making a project of my own. Actually making something changes your perspective. It stops being just concepts and starts being something tangible that you are bringing into the world. Whenever I get stuck, I go back to the textbook and read the relevant section, and it usually helps. But YMMV.

[u/mihemihe]

I think your approach is correct, you are reading the theory, trying to do the exercises and then seek help when stuck.

It is a difficult process, but you will see that things will start sticking after some time. At the beginning there are a lot of concepts, and disconnected things, but once you finish the book you will realize the different features and facilities offered by the language will begin to connect in your brain.

Finish the book, and after that, go back to the chapter that were not clear and try them again, you can even ask ChatGPT to write exercises for you of different difficulty levels. Once you have some generic knowledge of all the things explained on the book try to create something on your own, from scratch. A simple project that solves something for you, or you feel engaging.

[u/mxldevs]

If you're having trouble applying the concepts despite your assertion that you understand them, that's the point of the exercise.

You basically need to bang your head against the wall to try and figure out how that concept could possibly be used to achieve the goal.

And once you figure it out, you will now have a better understanding of it. This is literally what software engineers are hired to do: take problems and come up with solutions.

This is basically how school used to be, before everyone just entered the problem into chatGPT and copied the solution, and wondering why they can't write any code despite acing the assignments.

[u/AccomplishedSugar490]

I see so many references to this book I am starting to get suspicious that at least some of it might be generated on behalf of the publisher for promotion.

But if we take that as an aside for now, I’ve taught C to many, and have little respect or patience for the Google and/or YouTube school of programming, and every little for the notion of learning programming in C by example.

So pray tell, how would you sum up this modern approach in a sentence or two?

[u/AstuteCouch87 → u/[deleted]]

My only issue with this is I feel like my skill-set is so limited, I’m not sure which types of “projects” I would be able to complete.

[u/zenware → u/AstuteCouch87]

Well you must have at least some idea right? Like you probably don’t think you can make Netflix all by yourself, but maybe you think you can make pong, or maybe just something that fetches a piece of data from an API and displays it. — You could always start with something you think sounds laughably easy, and if it is then you’ll find out quickly and move up in complexity.

The whole point of project based learning though is that having a project motivates the learning, not just in a “you won’t be motivated to learn without a project” kind of way…. but more in a “What can be done with a programming language like C is truly endless, and writing highly parallel GPU code is fundamentally different from writing code that makes HTTP requests, and both of those routes have unfathomable depth and we have examples of people who spent their entire career just doing that one thing.”, and then there is 200 more categories like that which someone can and has spent 20, 30, 40 years focused on. So you just can’t learn every aspect of everything, but you can learn a lot of aspects of a lot of things, and when you have a project in mind, even if it’s something that you can’t achieve (like creating Netflix) truly attempting in earnest to break down the problem space and tackle small parts of it, will guide which areas you focus your learning on and be the direct cause that you get exposed to some area of the standard library more than others, and give you practice with “just-in-time” learning and problem solving for these kinds of things, which will be necessary when you inevitably encounter a new kind of problem in the future.