getting started with C

[chrisgotter]

I am a CS student and I am trying to get a head start on my upcoming fall quarter. To this end I would like to learn C, I have had a hard time getting it set up on my PC, and was wondering if anyone could spare the time to walk me through this step by step or direct me to a good website that could help in this regard.
-chris

[ahammel]

I like this book.

By "PC", do you mean "computer running Windows"? My understanding is that's a pretty painful environment to learn pure C in (although I've never tried). You may want to look into a Linux partition or VM.

[ycc1988]

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started/
If you ever advance to using makefiles, note that it's mingw32-make instead of plain make.

I don't know what book is best to get started, but one absolutely must own The C Programming Language. It's the C bible. It's also a very short book, C is not a complex language. That's what 3rd-party libraries are for.

[FLHerne]

By "PC", do you mean "computer running Windows"? My understanding is that's a pretty painful environment to learn pure C in (although I've never tried). You may want to look into a Linux partition or VM.

Windows is a painful environment to learn pure C in (I did try ). Linux (or even OSX, as a UNIX-like system) is much easier. If you do, KATE with the terminal plugin at the bottom and the right highlighting/indenting makes a nice IDE .

Of course, you might not be using Windows anyway, in which this post is entirely redundant and should be ignored .

[Jorpho]

I might suggest Cygwin, which provides a convenient set of Unix-like tools in Windows. It works, but it feels like something of a kludge.

[thicknavyrain]

This is pretty good, but it assumes you're using Xcode on a Mac:

http://www-teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk/co ... book_C.pdf

It can however be applied to any IDE if I recall correctly...

[Wnderer]

I learned with DJGPP but that was with Windows 95. I think it might work in DOSbox. If I was to start today I would use Microsoft Visual Studio C++, now that it is free.

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/e ... ns/express

[Yakk]

Are you familiar with command line interfaces?

[sam_i_am]

My recollection is that it takes quite a bit of set-up in order to get windows to compile c programs, where I believe I think that some Linux installations come with a c compiler(gcc)

In this day and age, It probably shouldn't be too much trouble for you to obtain an old computer, reformat it and install linux onto it.

You can also install Visual Studio C++ 2010 express, which is free. It might also support C programs. I know that VS2008 professional did, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the express version does.

[ahammel]

My recollection is that it takes quite a bit of set-up in order to get windows to compile c programs, where I believe I think that some Linux installations come with a c compiler(gcc)

And even in the ones don't (including Ubuntu), getting it is just a matter of typing sudo apt-get install build-essential or similar.

[Yakk]

You can get gcc on a PC via cygwin. You just have to find the checkbox for gcc.

[EvanED]

I'd also like to give a shout-out to clang, part of the LLVM project. You could use this instead of GCC, and I think there are native (maybe mingw-based?) builds for Windows.

[Idetuxs]

Same as ycc1988:
You should check the book of the authors of C. "Kerningan y Ritchie - The C programming language".
Also, if it's about IDE's Geany runs on Windows too. (install mingw to get gcc)

[Yakk]

K&R is a good book to own, but not a good book for a beginner to learn C from.

[Jplus]

I'd also like to give a shout-out to clang, part of the LLVM project. You could use this instead of GCC, and I think there are native (maybe mingw-based?) builds for Windows.

I second this.

Anyway, VC++ is not a pain to install (if your copy of Windows is legal, at least), and should work fine too. Cygwin and MinGW work, but... you'll always notice it's not native.