CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Beej’s Guide to C Programming (pdf)

Foreword

No point in wasting words here, folks, let’s jump straight into the C code:

    E((ck?main((z?(stat(M,&t)?P+=a+'{'?0:3:
    execv(M,k),a=G,i=P,y=G&255,
    sprintf(Q,y/'@'-3?A(*L(V(%d+%d)+%d,0)

And they lived happily ever after. The End.

What’s this? You say something’s still not clear about this whole C programming language thing?

Well, to be quite honest, I’m not even sure what the above code does. It’s a snippet from one of the entries in the 2001 International Obfuscated C Code Contest1, a wonderful competition wherein the entrants attempt to write the most unreadable C code possible, with often surprising results.

The bad news is that if you’re a beginner in this whole thing, all C code you see probably looks obfuscated! The good news is, it’s not going to be that way for long.

What we’ll try to do over the course of this guide is lead you from complete and utter sheer lost confusion on to the sort of enlightened bliss that can only be obtained though pure C programming. Right on…

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

mafinar

mafinar

Ah, Beej’s guide. Brings back fond memories when I was struggling to learn network programming.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Andy and Dave wrote this influential, classic book to help their clients create better software and rediscover the joy of coding. Almost ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
An “out-of-the-box” agile approach won’t work for your unique situation. Instead, unite agile and lean principles to design a custom appr...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Harness the promise of the cloud with Fugue, an operating system built for the cloud. If you’re a software engineer, architect, DevOps pr...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Great programmers practice to keep their skills sharp. Get sharp and stay sharp with 57 practice exercises rooted in real-world scenarios...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
By adopting nine key technical practices, you’ll learn to say what, why, and for whom before how; build in small batches; integrate conti...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
If you have trouble estimating cost or schedule for your projects, you are not alone. The question is this: who wants the estimate and wh...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
The Pragmatic Programmers classic is back! Freshly updated for modern software development, _Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java 8 With JUnit_...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Want to create a culture of innovation? Work as management teams and encourage learning and experimentation. Johanna Rothman @jroth...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File > New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New
xiji2646-netizen
Woke up to this today: Claude Code’s complete source code exposed via npm source map. Not a snippet. All 512,000 lines. 1,900 TypeScript ...
New