Teach yourself C in 24 hours
by Tony Zhang · first published 1997
9mentions
3recommended by
9HN commenters
2007–2026first – last mentioned
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"Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" by Tony Zhang (1997) seems interesting as well: http://aelinik.free.fr/c/ A previous HN discussion on that book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624521 EDIT: That earlier discussion has an…
on “Essential C (2003) [pdf]” ↗…first learning the basics of coding, I usually found programming books that focused on actually making things to be the best tools for learning. Books like "Beginning C++ through Game Programming" and "Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours" were way more engaging and picking apart the code samples probably taught me more than what most of my peers did in the intro to CS class in college. When you can actually see the changes to things…
on “What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS” ↗I remember reading a "Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours / 21 days" type book on a bus trip in the 1990s and learning C++ that way! It was a great start!
on “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)” ↗…teaching people to code. It's practically right there in the title. I think this will actually evaluate true in every single programming language as well, even those yet to be written: char title[] = "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours"; char meaning[] = "Cynical money-grab from people that haven't learned there is no shortcut to learning"; strcmp(title,meaning) == 0; Edit: I've always been a fan of the Ritchie book. Edit 2:…
on “Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (1997)” ↗Hard to say...There've been so many... I had this awesome book full of BASIC games for the Commodore 64. It ruled. Mastering Amiga Assembler Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (all of the Teach Yourself * in 24 Hours books are embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as "For Dummies" books). Ooh...No, I've got it: I took the TCP/IP portion of the MCSE exams, and I had a study…
on “Ask YC: What is the most embarrassing technical book that you have ever owned?” ↗…institution more substantial books were always in short supply, as they'd never have more than 5-6 copies of a single book, so you'd arrive at the computing section and find... "Java 2 for Dummies". Or "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours". Books that might have been fine to self-learners (when they were not significantly outdated), but nothing that wouldn't be covered in a textbook and nothing more substantial. Probably this is a disconnect…
on “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper” ↗…experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial. My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.
on “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)” ↗…"jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK! But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated…
on “The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar” ↗indeed building a working C compiler from scratch is literally in my "teach yourself C in 24 hours" book from 30 years ago
on “We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler” ↗