Re^2: What book would be valuable to someone self-taught?

[mrstlee]

Can't agree with you there. C is an awful language for a beginner. All that pointer management. 20-odd% of a C developers time (according to research quoted by Robert Glass) is spent debugging memory-address errors. Great practice for debugging the linux kernel. Not so great for web page scraping.

[Marshall]

I did not say that C is the "right" place for all beginners to start. I said: I will admit that [C] perhaps it is not the best place for you to start depending upon what you want to accomplish.

This has a lot to do with how proficient you want to become and what kind of problems that you want to solve.

Basic loop structures, data types, etc are very important. These are the basics. You won't write Perl or any programming language very well unless you understand these fundamentals. This is true in BASIC, JAVA, FORTRAN, C, Perl.

[mrstlee]

Ok. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you advocated C as the best choice for a beginner.
C apprenticeship involves plenty of determination, linker errors, seg faults, and printf. Investigation of the more creative aspects doesn't come until a fair bit later. One thing I would say is that programming in C really made me appreciate perl!