ready for C or C++?

[Will Ware]

Xmnemonic (xmnemonic at aol.com) wrote:
> If I've learned Python and become proficient with it, am I ready to learn C or
> C++?

The venerable ancient way to learn C is with Kernighan and Ritchie's
book "The C Language". That will start with fairly elementary C programs
and develop the language in a way that seemed reasonable and systematic
to people who'd participated in its design. (Alas my historical knowledge
begins to fail me here... I think there were other designers as well.)
An alternative would be to find one of those plastic 3-ring-binder
cheat sheets, though it might serve as a pretty poor tutorial. Or you
could look around to see whatever's popular in the Learn-C-in-24-hours
category.

Another approach would be to start with Modules/xxmodule.c and
Objects/xxobject.c. The downside to that approach is that you will be
starting with fairly complicated C stuff, the upside is that it will be
well integrated into the Python world with which you are already
familiar, and you'll be starting from stuff that is working (until your
changes break it).

You might want to jump back and forth between the two approaches, making
the jump whenever you get frustrated. Remember that C is a reasonably
complicated thing so don't expect (book titles notwithstanding) that you
will pick up everything you want to know in a very short time.
-- 
import string,time,os;print string.join((lambda x:x[:10]+x[8:])(map(
lambda x:string.center("*"*(lambda x:((x<24) ### Seasons Greetings, Will Ware
*(x-3))+3)(x),24),range(1,28, 2))),"\n") ################ wware at world.std.com