Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!aurora!labrea!agate!ucbvax!UCSCB.UCSC.EDU!lupin3
From: lupin3@UCSCB.UCSC.EDU (-=/ Larry Hastings /=-)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What's a good textbook?
Message-ID: <8802050815.AA01987@ucscb.UCSC.EDU>
Date: 5 Feb 88 08:15:46 GMT
References: <523@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <128@mccc.UUCP> <2023@pdn.UUCP> <140@mccc.UUCP> <1429@sugar.UUCP> <184@mccc.UUCP>
Sender: uucp@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: lupin3%ucscb.UCSC.EDU@ucscc.UCSC.EDU
Organization: Uncle Charlies Summer Camp (UC Santa Cruz)
Lines: 44

+-In article <184@mccc.UUCP>, pjh@mccc.UUCP (Peter J. Holsberg) wrote:-
+----------
|
| In article <1429@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
| |In article <140@mccc.UUCP>, pjh@mccc.UUCP (Peter J. Holsberg) writes:
| |> and lacking in both examples and explanations.  A person learning C from
| |> K&R would have to spend many hours testing and playing to understand their
| |> examples.
| |
| |Anyone who learns a language without spending hours testing and playing with
| |it is a much better programmer than those of us who learned 'C' from K&R.
| |Or else they didn't really learn it...
| |-- 
| |-- Peter da Silva  `-_-'  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
| 
| Oops!  I sure didn't express myself very well on that one!  I agree
| completely that one doesn't really *learn* a language until one has done
| much on-line playing with examples.  What I meant was that a text book
| can be written so that it includes many good examples, each of which i
| explained thoroughly.  See, for example, any of the "dissection" books
| by Kelley and Pohl.  Having dissected examples gives the non-genius
| student direction in his/her exploration on the computer.
| .
| 
| -- 
| Peter Holsberg                  UUCP: {rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh
|
+----------

  How interesting... I'm taking "Introduction to C" this quarter (so I'm
little precocious in reading this newsgroup...) and the textbook for the
course is "C by Dissection", by Kelly and Pohl.  Even more interesting is
that the teacher is Ira Pohl... he takes the subject quite slowly (well, it
seems real slow to me anyways..) but surely.  However, I also taught myself
some C over the summer, out of K&R...
  What I would say is that "C by Dissection" would be good for a beginning
user (someone new to computers, and Unix... the book is very Unix-specific),
wheras K&R would be good for a hacker who didn't know C yet.  K&R talks to
you on a very high level, kind of obtusely, and (while fun for hackers) is
very scary for neophites...
-- 
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