--- Geoff Roberts <geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au> wrote: That is true. I was also fortunate enough to sieze the opportunity. Of the handful of college barely-over-minimum-wage backup operators that paraded through SRC, only two of us are making a living in IT. Most of the operators mounted the tapes, printed the labels and read trashy novels while the TU-78 did its stuff for 6 hours. The other geek and I wrote programs on one of the other systems while the main system was being backed up. We both ended up as full-time programmers for the company's VMS and UNIX products. Several people had access to the programming resources. Most did nothing with the opportunity. I got my first job writing 6502 assembler for the C-64 in 1982 before I was old enough to drive. My mother had to drop me off and work and sign my contracts. I realize this is atypical, but there it is. I did start off at University with a double CS and EE major. I took one "FORTRAN for Engineers" class and after two years in the program switched my major and earned a BA in History (while learning to program in C on the side at work). So given your above model of the anticipated career paths of C programmers, I would most closely fall into A). I learned C at work, doing a project to automate one of my assigned job tasks after having been a professional assembler programmer for two to three years. I did it by asking the "real" programmers at work, exploring source code and reading K&R cover to cover several times. I still tell people to start with that book, BTW. It's a goldmine of information. I'm not sure I agree here. Have you read K&R? It assumes a PDP-11/VAXish machine architecture, but it covers the basic data structures, linked lists, multi-dimensional arrays, strings, pointers to arrays of pointers. More than enough stuff to get you into buckets of trouble. I did work with TP at one job. The programmer there would certainly be described as a newbie. He was a business major, not a geek. I have no idea how he ever produced that much working code except by pure force of will. It was extremely inelegant. Again, that depends. I've seen some stuff that was absolutely unintellegible without comments (and not very understandable even _with_ comments) and other things that are so idiomatic and commonly used that adding comments disturbs the flow to the point of hiding what's happening. There are other languages that are _more_ "write only" (APL comes to mind immediately), but I do agree that zero comments makes C extremely difficult to understand. It tends to happen when anyone makes somewhat broad and somewhat firm statements about anything in this biz, editors, OSes _and_ languages, to name a few. _That_ is typical in my experience. ===== Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to vanish, please note my new public address: erd(a)iname.com The original webpage address is still going away. The permanent home is: http://penguincentral.com/ See http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com