How long to learn C? [closed]

Answer 1

C will take a week to learn, and a lifetime to master.

Answer 2

Reading a K&R book and not writing code is like reading a book on weapons and never actually shooting. Yes, you've read in a book, that it works this way, but you have never encountered the typical problems that arise while doing this. Without practice such "knowlegde" is worth very little.

Plan to spend 2-3 years slowly writing small programs for solving different tasks in C. This will count as real experince. C provides delayed gratification for your effort.

Answer 3

To understand the pain of memory management just being writing sample programs with stacks, linked lists, binary trees, etc. You'll see what you're getting into.

In school i was taught C as the introductory language and as pointers got introduced a whole slew of individuals dropped the class because frankly it's a hard concept to grasp.

As many of the other answers have stated... Plan to not only read but practice. There's no doubt that you haven't learned alot from C# by just making mistakes while coding and having 'aha!' moments.

IMO: 3 to 4 years to really understand the majority of concepts. A book will help you realize what the capabilities of the language are.

Answer 4

Ten Years

Answer 5

In a couple of weekends, you will obtain mainly two results:

1. hello world
2. a lot of segmentation faults

C is not easy, in particular if you are not used to its hardcore concept. You will have to invest weeks, even months in tinkering with it, to grasp the most obscure (but still not too much) essence.

Answer 6

I read the K&R book cover to cover and would not say I have any great understanding of C. Some time doing the exercises in K&R would be hugely beneficial.

I'm sure C libraries would make you more productive writing programs, but if it is simply learning C you are interested in, then you can implement anything yourself that you need. www.projecteuler.net is a good source of problems (although slightly mathematical in general) for you to get started on, if you fancy trying some coding outside of the K^R exercises.