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Article:
  C is for Cocoa
Subject:   C for the masochists
Date:   2003-07-30 00:58:07
From:   anonymous2
Compared with Perl and Java, C is a difficult language because of the need to manage memory manually and fiddle with pointers. If you are a casual programmer, I would recommend that you stick with languages with automatic garbage collection such as shell/Python/Ruby/PERL/Python/AppleScript. Furthermore, you will probably write more programs in these languages than in C because of their built-in features (regular expressions, etc.)


If you are really masochistic (:-), I would recommend the following two books:


Advanced C Programming by Example Authors John Perry ISBN 0534951406 Publisher PWS Publishing Co. A difficult book (lots of pointers!) but very rewarding.


Interprocess Communications in Unix, by John Shapley Gray. An excellent book on Unix programming in C.
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  • C for the masochists
    2003-08-02 16:17:52  retro [Reply | View]

    The idea behind this article, as I see it, is to teach people enough C so that they can use Objective-C and Cocoa. Learning a language with automatic garbage collection would be pointless since Objective-C does not have automatic garbage collection. However the memory management is different and simpler than straight C; you don't have to deal with malloc and free. Also, there is less fiddling with pointers.