What is the best alternative to Learn C The Hard Way?
Pro It's excerpted from the idea of its creators
This book is written by Dennis Ritchie, who was one of the main people behind the development and design of C and UNIX.
Pro Well known classic
This book is so well known that it's affectionately called "K & R", after the authors. It's been cited in many other books and is familiar to most, if not all, CS students.
Pro Creative, challenging exercises
The challenges at the end of each chapter do a great job of requiring many of the skills learned up to that point. Completing the challenges is a great way of insuring you understand the material.
Con Teaches bad style
The K&R style works for old Unix mainframe command-line programs that exit after a simple task and leave the cleanup to the OS; where input is only from trusted experts; and most functions are only called internally to the program. The environment is very different today. This style will get yo...
Con Out of Date
Some commands and practices are out of date, so errata and googling is needed while going through the book.
Con Not for beginners
Assumes familiarity not only with programming concepts but some C language specifics.
Pro Community trust
Instead of getting a recommendation from a single dev, you get recommendation from the entire programming community.
Pro Recommendation for every programming language/framework/library
You can find Python as well as Jenkins.
Pro Nice filters
Free, Video, Book, Beginner, Advanced, etc.
Pro Offline learning mode for mobile apps
Allows learning while disconnected from the net.
Pro Easy for beginners
Anyone can get started with this.
Con Only the most commonly used languages are covered.
C++, Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, SQL, PHP, Swift, Ruby, JQuery, HTML, CSS. You won't find anything less common like Haskell, Erlang, Elixir, Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Rust, etc.
Con Limited usefulness for intermediate or experienced programmers
No advanced coding challenges. Look for those on other sites like hackerrank.
Pro Challenges your way of thinking
The book really challenges you to think like a programmer by constantly asking questions that force you to solve problems, rather than telling you how to solve the problem and only asking you to write the syntax.
Pro Written in a very clear, understandable way
The author breaks things down into small pieces and uses examples to explain everything in a very clear way.
Con Answers to exercises aren't provided
The exercises throughout the book don't have the exercises provided, which may be a con to beginners.
Pro Great for people who know just the very basics of programming
This book is excellent for people who have basic knowledge of programming concepts or have read an introductory book on programming or C++.
Pro Explains C++11 extension well
5th edition adds information on C++11 additions and integrates it throughout the book so it's not just an appendix with new stuff.
Pro Covers the core of the language without omitting anything critical
The book describes core concepts of C++ programming in-depth. It covers various nuances that would otherwise be easy to misinterpret.
Pro High quality instruction
CS50x is the actual Harvard course turned into a MOOC, with the lectures filmed from the actual Harvard course. The problem sets are all the same as well. This has resulted in the quality of the course being extremely high.
Pro Really in-depth
The reason the time demand for the course is so great is because of how in-depth it is. CS50 has you programming in C right from the start. Computer Science concepts, such as runtime analysis and data structures, are also taught very early on and applied in projects. Along with C, this course wi...
Pro Amazing instructors
The instructors are very enthusiastic and extremely knowledgeable. The main professor uses a variety of fun examples to demonstrate points, often making for exciting and funny lectures.
Con Large demand on time
The course is very fast-paced. Weekly suggested readings are usually a couple of chapters from two different text books, there are hours of videos each week, plus problem sets that often take a beginner many hours to complete. In order to keep up with the course, you have to be prepared to put in...
Pro Huge language supports most everything
C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++
Pro Powerful memory management
Allows puting large arrays on the "heap" to avoid "stack overflow".
Pro Teaches fundamental OOP
Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming.
Con Huge language gets in the way of learning
C++ is such an atrociously over-complicated language that its learning curve may get in the way of learning fundamentals. Learning C++ well is a ten-year project, and even experts are frequently surprised by the language.
Con Undefined behavior
Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C++ standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C++ compiler writers are free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably...
Con Module system is not great
C++ uses the #include mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are: Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those...
Pro Video tutorials
Tutorials are presented as videos, making them easy to follow / see what's going on at each step. Many people find this format less daunting and easier to take in than traditional text based tutorials.
Pro Setup instructions included
The first video explains how to set up everything you need to get started on your machine. A lot of tutorials tell you about the language but leave you in the dark on how to get it up and running, creating a stumbling block before the first post.
Pro Suitable for beginners
No assumptions are made about prior knowledge, meaning anyone can start watching and pick up the basics of the language fairly quickly.
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