Re: Learning languages from a book
Sometime in the 1980s I first needed to learn C. I picked up the C book, K&R.
After reading the whole thing, it told me little of any value. Most memorably, I came out puzzled: surely C does dynamic memory allocation? Yet I had to ask "what's the C equivalent of Pascal's new"? Yes, it's true, there is not a single mention of malloc in the whole of K&R[1]!
In fact, the most informative learning resource I could find was a Microsoft VC++ manual. Despite the fact that I wasn't even working on an MS operating system, let alone with their compiler. It just happened to be something I could find.
Towards the end of the '80s, I read Stroustrup on C++ and found him a lot more informative. Though when I wanted to get to grips with STL in the 1990s, I found again a great gap in available documentation.
Perl was so much easier, with all the docs built in. Never looked at a Perl book, though.
[1] I understand that may have changed in later editions of K&R.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
