ZEzedshaw·Jan 16, 2012
Excellent critique, but you show your hand here:
> K&R is an excellent reference, and LCTHW covers some new topics like valgrind, which is great.
Wrong, I already demonstrate that they have an example that is basically strcpy() and I show why it's broken. By the time I'm done with the book I'll have taken apart the entire book and shown that it's the source of most security holes through poor examples.
> However, it fails to point out that some of the exercises are just that; exercises. For example, creating a custom type system in C. Never do this.
Totally wrong. You basically just said that all of gobjects (the foundation of Gnome) should not exist, yet it's a successful object oriented abstraction. You may think that's true, but then you'd be in the vast minority. Without a demonstrated reason why one should never do this, your stat
Read the rest
ement is total bullshit.
> Some other failings include; little attention to testing, no mention of cmake (used in major projects like opencv and clang) or lint(!), criticism of K&R systax (arguably validly so, but industry standard is industry standard).
There's extensive attention to testing, with nearly every exercise having use of valgrind and the inclusion of defensive programming macros not found in most other books PLUS a constant demand to break the code they've just written. In the second half of the book I'll be including the testing suite I use in my own projects:
https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/master/tests/minuni...
This claim is borderline slanderous it's so wrong.
Edit: And cmake is a piece of crap that isn't better than modern make.
> Look there's a lot of good in Learn C the Hard Way. I completely recommend it as a way to learn some C... but don't make the mistake of assuming a new book is better than an old book just because it's new.
Meanwhile, you make the mistake of not questioning the code in K&R when a cursory read finds numerous flaws and buffer overflows. If you feel that people should evaluate all things objectively (I agree!) then do it yourself and actually read K&R again.
And by the way, they updated it several times to remove defects since you probably read it. My copy was only a few years old and I had to update it because they fixed bugs in that copy() function I tear apart (but not enough).
> If you're programming C, read K&R. If you're doing it professionally, you probably also want to read Deep Sea Programming by Peter van der Linden.
I agree, solid recommendations, but I'm going to advocate people read K&R for historical reasons and to practice code review, which is what I'm doing in my book.