On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 14:32 +1100, Rod Butcher wrote:
> Hello Sluggers, I'm having to teach myself some C so I can deal with
> debugging problems with C modules used by perl (my primary interest is
> the perl scripts, but I'm tired of feeling helpless when C programs
> won't build or just die).
> 
> I've found an online university course tutorial which covers basic data
> types, operators, functions, prototyping, structures, pointers,
> malloc :-
> http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/
>  It's dated 1999. Should this be enough, any major changes since then,
> any recommended tutorials out there ?

There hasn't been too many changes since then. I believe C99 is still
the accepted standard standard (can anyone verify that?)

> Also - am I OK just working with a text editor like Gedit, or do I
> really need to use some API to do things properly ?

I assume you mean IDE. If you're happy with Gedit, then that's great. I
like vim personally. Two tools I find invaluable in navigating C code
(and are largely editor agnostic) are ctags and cscope. If you're on
debian you want the exuberant-ctags package. Then you run 'ctags -R' on
your C source to build a database out of it, and anything you want to
see the definition of (functions, structs etc), you put the cursor on
and hit ctrl-] and you'll be jumped straight to it. ctrl-t takes you
back to where you were.

cscope is useful essentially as the inverse of ctags, and there's vim
bindings for it too, but it's perfectly usable as a stand-alone app.

Presumably other-editor-experts can tell you the equivalents in other
editors.

> Recommended newbie-friendly C mailing lists ?

slug-chat?

> Anything else I should study to do this properly ?

Probably, but most of it is just practice.

HTH,

James.

-- 
"There is no I in TEAM but there is an i in Ninja"
  -- http://www.ninjaburger.com/sekrit/

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