learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures

That's easy. After learning the language, study good C code. Try to grok how the masters build higher-level abstractions. Learn from widely used C code that is not a toy. Examples: sqlite.org, git-scm.org If you don't understand something, look it up in the C standard doc. Most of the time, you will want to program for speed, and C will let you. Learn and practice C profiling. Also, you will need to learn defensive programming. The best source about this is "Learn C The Hard Way" by Zed Shaw: https://github.com/zedshaw/learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures

It's a very common pattern for C memory allocation checking. A public example I know off the top of my head can be seen here: https://github.com/zedshaw/learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures/blo... (the implementation of the CHECK macro). That's in a C tutorial but I've implemented a version of that macro frequently. Let's say you need to dynamically allocate two buffers in a function and want to make sure they are freed at the end of your call. You can use this macro like so: int two_bufs(int n, int m) { int *buf_1 = NULL; int *buf_2 = NULL; buf_1 = calloc(n, sizeof(int)); CHECK(buf_1); buf_2 = calloc(m, sizeof(int)); CHECK(buf_2); // ... lots of cool things with buf_1 and buf_2 error: free(buf_1); free(buf_2); // Safe if null }

Nice tip, I started with something short - writing a screenshot utility: https://youtu.be/3BF-vUts3ws Ed: i really enjoyed the video, but I feel it could have been even better (and shorter) if he used a proper debugger for the second part. But I don't know if that is available in the os. The more I use a debugger, the more I realize I should use a debugger, and the earlier I should use a debugger. Advice/directions to start early with a debugger might be the best part of Zed Shaws "Learn C the hard way". Eg: https://github.com/zedshaw/learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures/blo... (not a full featured chapter, but note that this is fairly early - exercise 4). On a related note, it appears Shaw doesn't use the/any debugger at all in the ruby book, which is frankly quite crazy - ruby has great debuggers and repl. But that's a digression. For a blog p