Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 22 Dec 1998 11:32:20 -0800 (PST)
From:      David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com>
To:        eddie@silk.net, grios@netshell.vicosa.com.br
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD and C Programming
Message-ID:  <199812221932.LAA25417@pau-amma.whistle.com>
In-Reply-To: <367F0754.12665B76@netshell.vicosa.com.br>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 00:43:32 -0200
>From: Gustavo Vieira G C Rios <grios@netshell.vicosa.com.br>

>if you wanna be a real programmer you should know the hardware you are
>programming to, right ?

I respectfully disagree.

Consider, for example, that Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer
Programming" uses an reference machine that doesn't really exist (though
I'm sure folks have written emulators for it... after he wrote the
book(s)).

Best suggestion I have is to find a problem that you need to solve, and
for which a (set of) program(s) written in C might reasonably be considered
a viable approach to solving it.  Look at good code as a starting-point;
try /usr/src/*, for example.  Often, I've found that starting by
figuring out how to make a least-intrusive change to an existing program
can be quite instructive.  (Then again, sometimes what the program
really *needs* is to be gutted & re-constructed from the ground up.
Experience can help you distinguish the two cases.)

Start small; build on that.  Revise your building-blocks until they're
reliable.

Caveat:  I don't write code for a living (usually); I do sysadmin work.
I have written code for a living, though, and have been known to do so
somewhat recently.

david
-- 
David Wolfskill		UNIX System Administrator
dhw@whistle.com		voice: (650) 577-7158	pager: (650) 371-4621

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199812221932.LAA25417>