How do I practice Unix programming in C?

Question

After five years of professional Java (and to a lesser extent, Python) programming and slowly feeling my computer science education slip away, I decided I wanted to broaden my h

Answer 1

Here are a few stackoverflow postings discussing C/Unix programming books. Their main claim to fame is extensive fan-out to other resources.

Practice some of the idioms (understand the ins and outs of pointers etc) and pick projects that help with that. The third item in the list has an answer (disclaimer, I wrote it) with a bunch of high-level C idioms where an idiomatic C program would differ from Java.

Learning XLib or Win32 GUI programming with C is probably less useful as almost anything is better than C for GUI programming and wrapping a core C engine with another language is generally much easier - unless you're really concerned with speed. As a starting point, concentrate on 'systems' programming applications, which is where you are most likely to get real mileage from C. Learn how the C interface of one of the scripting languages like Tcl or Python works.

Writing some bit-twiddly and pointer heavy code (e.g. picking apart network packets or interpreting a protocol), or server-side items using sockets will take you right into C's core competencies. If you've got some of the WRS books, try making pthreads work (IIRC UNP2 has a big section about pThreads). For a contrast, write something that uses non-blocking I/O. This stuff is C's home turf and you'll get a good working knowledge of C by doing this. Troll through the RFCs for some ideas of network protocols to implement.

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