11 May
2010
11 May
'10
11:15 a.m.
Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 12:12:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
I used to be able to get K&R past them by calling
it "a classic work", and
by declaring it to be one of two texts for the class (the other being some
modern POS that we never bothered to open)
For a FIRST class in C, the commonly used textbooks are Deitel (600p, of
which 300 are about C, plus discussion of C++, Java, etc.), and "C Primer
Plus". Both are pretty good for beginners, but neither prepares the
student for what will happen when scanf is fed unformatted/sloppy data.
The clearest C book for beginners that I've read was "C: Step-by-Step" by
Waite & Prata. It actually teaches the material, rather than just
throwing it on the floor and hoping the student will pick it up.
Supplemented by K&R it made an excellent teaching vehicle. My opinion and
obviously different folks learn in different manners, but I felt that
Waite & Prata filled in the holes better and left fewer unexplained
assumptions than other works that I have seen.
And it won't give one back problems the way Deitel will.
Jeff Walther
11 May
11 May
2:43 p.m.
On Tue, 11 May 2010, Jeff Walther wrote:
The clearest C book for beginners that I've read
was "C: Step-by-Step" by
Waite & Prata. It actually teaches the material, rather than just
throwing it on the floor and hoping the student will pick it up.
Supplemented by K&R it made an excellent teaching vehicle. My opinion and
obviously different folks learn in different manners, but I felt that
Waite & Prata filled in the holes better and left fewer unexplained
assumptions than other works that I have seen.
"C Primer Plus" is also by Waite, Prata, and Martin.
I like their style more than Deitel.
Deitel's coverage of C derivatives is useful, but too large a portion of
his book.
There is another "C primer" type of title by somebody else. Pretty good,
but not as versatile as the Waite Group stuff.
For a FIRST ASM book I liked Lafore's book (another Waite Group title),
but it is thoroughly out of print.
Unfortunately, most of the other classes in the area spend most of the
first semester on how to use THE MICROSOFT C COMPILER, and don't ever show
the student a command line nor a SIMPLE IDE. Many of those students hit
"RUN" in the IDE, and never even understand the requirement to create an
.EXE file! (nor how to use other compilers when necessary)
In ASM, I started them off in DEBUG, and they write a few very simple
programs before we switch over to MASM. It seemed to give a better
understanding of what a program is, and what is going on when building a
program.
I seemed to have gotten a reputation for being the hardest, and toughest
grader, but MY students had the ability to pick up an unfamiliar tool and
work through how to use it.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
4:05 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-
bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred Cisin
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 11:44 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Teaching(Was: Lisa C and Lisa FORTRAN
On Tue, 11 May 2010, Jeff Walther wrote:
[snip]
The clearest C book for beginners that I've
read was "C: Step-by-
Step" by
Waite & Prata. It actually teaches the
material, rather than just
throwing it on the floor and hoping the student will pick it up.
Supplemented by K&R it made an excellent teaching vehicle. My
opinion and
obviously different folks learn in different
manners, but I felt that
Waite & Prata filled in the holes better and left fewer unexplained
assumptions than other works that I have seen.
Unfortunately, most of the other classes in the area spend most of the
first semester on how to use THE MICROSOFT C COMPILER, and don't ever
show
the student a command line nor a SIMPLE IDE. Many of those students
hit
"RUN" in the IDE, and never even understand the requirement to create
an
.EXE file! (nor how to use other compilers when necessary)
Microsoft's developer products are built to make coders more productive, which means
it's going to hide the 'hard' parts that we agree young people should learn -
unless, of course, they are going to be dependent on MS products for their entire careers.
And no one would want that to happen, would they? ;-)
Frankly, I have been and more more irritated with each iteration of "Visual
Studio." It keeps trying to manage my work for me, and IMO it keeps getting in the
way! One other annoyance is that they seem to refactor the UI with every release so when
I need to do something like add a lib or include path I spend more time looking for the
right dialog -> tab -> treebranch -> editbox than I spent writing the code in the
first place.
And why haven't they figured out how to parse and use makefiles? That's been a
standard for, oh, lo these many moons? Oh, that's right, you don't need makefiles
if you built your code in Visual Studio. Here, I'd better have another glass of this
Kool-Aid... ahh, all better now. -- Ian
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