Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

• Redis

  318 64,705 9.7 C

  Redis is an in-memory database that persists on disk. The data model is key-value, but many different kind of values are supported: Strings, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Streams, HyperLogLogs, Bitmaps.

  

I'm not a C engineer, but I think I have an interesting recommendation to consider.

Since you are already familiar with other languages, you obviously don't need to know the basics of C. The basics are the same everywhere. Instead, you'd likely want to build that mindset on how to build good software with C.

I suggest you read other people's code and try to deep dive into the whys.

I heard Redis is a well-written software.

    git clone https://github.com/redis/redis.git

• raylib

  399 18,791 9.8 C

  A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

I suggest downloading and playing with Raylib[1]. It's written in C, not C++, and is a library for video games, but it can be used to produce apps too. It has a ton of examples for you to review and modify as you learn, and it is cross platform. There are even bindings to other languages if you decide to leave C and use your favorite language. It's a one-click download and setup. Couldn't be easier and more fun!

[1] https://www.raylib.com/

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• Mongoose

  32 10,554 9.6 C

  Embedded Web Server (by cesanta)

  

The language is only part of it. In my opinion, you would learn even more about C by consuming well-known libraries written in C and trying to do something useful with it and complementing that with some books, etc rather than just learning the syntax and semantics of C.

There are tons of useful/fun things you could do with C. Write some desktop apps with GTK, a web server with Mongoose (https://mongoose.ws), etc.

• profun

  2 80 0.0 C

  Procedural vs Functional

  

A main issue with learning C is getting the architecture right (header and source files), and figuring out the tooling for compiling and debugging and building (gcc and gdb and make/cmake for example). I like C in a Nutshell 2nd ed (Prinz/Crawford) 2016 as a reference for any questions about that:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/c-in-a/9781491924174/

As far as code examples, I find there's of simple C graphics programs using the SDL2 library discussed on Youtube. Also simple ncurses programs are worth looking at. For example here's a video on making a tic-tac-toe game with pure C linked to github source code, just a few files:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCVMkKgs3uQ

https://github.com/tsoding/profun/tree/master/procedural

For practice, CodeWars has a lot of nice simple C challenges to work on.

• src

  745 3,036 10.0 C

  Read-only git conversion of OpenBSD's official CVS src repository. Pull requests not accepted - send diffs to the tech@ mailing list.

  

For me, when I learned more than 20 years ago, reading source and manpages from Linux and other Unix like projects was a source of inspiration.

I'd recommend OpenBSD libc. https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/lib/libc

I also learned a lot by reading manpages of libc functions or Unix utilities and thinking about how they were implemented, and writing my own little versions.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project