How long to learn C? [closed]

Answer 1

40 days and 40 nights.

If you can't do the days and nights sequentially, then it will be 42 weekends.

But seriously, without putting any context on how fast you learn other topics, nobody can give you a real answer that is relevant to you. We can say how long it took us to learn it to a satisfying level, but that has zero correlation to how long it should take you to learn it.

If you said it took you 6 months to be good at C#, then maybe we can say it should take you 6 months * X (where X is still a guess, but a better guess than now).

We can all agree, however, that just reading the book is not enough. Of course you will have to write code. That is how we best learn anything - read it, write it, teach it. If you really want to learn something, teach it.

Answer 2

You definitely need to write some code - I don't believe you can learn any language without doing that. K&R has lots of exercises you can practice on. It's difficult to know how long in terms of elapsed time it will take to get a good working knowledge - I used to teach pretty much the whole language in 4.5 days, but that is quite intensive. I'd suggest about a month, if you are doing an hour or so a day.

Edit: I must admit, I find it a bit depressing that so many people think C is so difficult. K&R is 272 pages long, in my copy, and covers basically everything you need to know, including the standard library. Is there book in ANY other programming language that covers the whole shebang so concisely? I don't think so, and the reason is not that K&R is compressed in some way (Brian Kernighan is THE greatest techical writer, IMHO) but that the language is simple and easy to describe.

Answer 3

It will take a lot lot longer if you just sit around asking abstract questions and not actually diving in and doing it. Do you have a deadline or something? How long will it take me to learn the piano? Who cares, I just wanna make some noise. That's how kids learn so fast. They don't care about becoming an expert, or even good. They just like to play.

In any case, if you want to learn some interesting things, try some assembler as well. A lot of people really hate it, but that's just because they don't like spending countless hours not accomplishing much. I like it just fine.

Answer 4

If you can read K&R and understand it all, that's pretty good, as K&R covers pretty much all of the language.

However, reading it and understanding it all are very different. You should probably take a few passes through K&R and do all the associated exercises to ensure you really know it.

Even after reading through all of that, you will spend more months learning pointers the hard way. Expect lots of seg faults. On the plus side though, you'll get really good at reading hex!

There are a few caveats that the language has that you'll find out as well. One that used to give me trouble is that all pointers are the same size (4 bytes on x86), regardless of what they point at. A char* is the same size as a void* and an int*.

Answer 5

I'm not sure how long it takes to learn a language - it probably comes down to the individual. But I'm pretty confident you can't learn one without writing and debugging code in it.