Excerpts from Robin Gareus's message of 2010-10-14 00:32:47 +0200: > On 10/14/10 00:11, Folderol wrote: > > On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:03:19 +0200 > > fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > >> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 03:42:46PM -0500, Josh Lawrence wrote: > >> > >>> Sparing you a lot of useless back story here, but for fun a for > >>> personal amusement (NOT for serious work), I'd like to start learning > >>> a programming language. If I'm gonna learn one, I might as well learn > >>> something that gets a lot of use in the open-source world. So which > >>> one to choose? C or C++? > >> > >> First learn C. Make sure you go to the bottom of it. > >> Then learn C++, and select what's useful for you and what isn't. > > I concur. Start with C. > > a rule of thumb: for GUIs and complex structures: C++ ;for algorithms: C > > Apart from some book, the 'manpages-dev' package (section 3 manual > pages) come in really handy. eg `man 3 printf` gives you a full overview > and even example code. > > After you grasped some basics, reading other PPL's code is something > that helps a lot. > > I've started some small off-list online tutoring; walking through > JACKd's simple_client.c and Fons's jnoise source with Philipp > Ueberbacher recently and can post our conversation if you're interested. > > >> Ciao, > >> > > Glad to know I made the right decision! > > > > // Still prevaricating with pointers and struggling with structures :( > > I recently recommended this one to Philipp: > http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/PointersAndMemory.pdf > > It's an nice read and I especially like the first sentence: > > "There's a lot of nice, tidy code you can write without knowing about > pointers. But once you learn to use the power of pointers, you can never > go back." > > best, > robin And I really appreciate this :) Sadly I have had little time at my hands so far, it will hopefully get better this weekend. To the original poster: I can't tell what's the best way to start. I'm interested in C because it's practically needed for audio processing and because it's the predecessor of many common languages. Also, C is a good match with lua, which is a scripting language that I really like and dabble with from time to time. But besides that I have to learn Java for university, whether I like it or not :) All I can really tell so far is that for a small set of things a certain kind of language is required, for everything else it seems to be very much a matter of preference. Regards, Philipp _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
