Sunday 8 April 2012

Guides : Basics Of Programming

     I had an intention to write a book just after completing my higher secondary to help students, and make them learn thing easily. But at that time, with very little experience in writing articles, how could I write a book. Also I didn't have expertise in any field. But the idea writing a book for C-programming strike long ago in the beginning of 2010. But I came to know that there are much better books available in internet, why should I write one.

Book Cover

    After completing the fourth semester, I realized that pupil still do not have enough experience with C-programming. I started writing this guide, with a title of "Programming in C for Embedded System". I have asked my fellow students about this, but the questions they asked me narrowed my research. I started rephrasing them into Basic constructs Programming text. It took nearly two weeks to finish with my so called record works. I thought I could publish this guide before a week. Unfortunately I was unable to complete the text. And finally, here it is.

      Section 01: Variables and Arrays
      Section 02: Execution and Control Flow
      Section 03: Functions

    Say something in comments sections.

12 comments:

Don't bother unless you want a good laugh

I downloaded your "book" to give it the benefit of the doubt. Compared to any other book i have read this is hardly a standout publication or even one useful to anyone. The english is tortured for a start - although i do appreciate that english may not be your first language.

From your section on variables and values - you don't seem to understand the differences between register/static etc - they are suggestions as to where the compiler might store the values no instructions - in any case any sufficiently complicated program the compiler will almost always do a far better job of optimising code than the programmer will. Your description of arrays is confusing - and you make no mention of struct, or poniters, or stings with null delimiters or floats. You state categorically that a char is always one byte ad an it is always 4 bytes - that is by no means guaranteed.

Also no mention of floating point arithmetic, casts between types, rounding errors, arithmetical operators, etc etc etc.

Your section on flow control is equally difficult to read and no less inaccurate - you don't give sufficient examples of useful code - and all of your loops seem to concentrate on iteation on one variable - no mention of nesting of structures - or looping on other conditions, or items like break.

You state repeatedly that the reader will understand the differences between the few examples you give - but you never explain those differences - so one has to ask if you really understand them.

In your section on functions - two obvious items jump out - no mention of return, and no mention of recursion - two more items that you don't really undestand ?
Also in this chapter to stat using pointers without ever desrcibing them in pevious chapter, and you attempt to describe scope - but don't really succeed. You also suddently introduce two source code files - why not stick with one and make everyone's life so much easier.
You state that C supports functional programmig paradigm - you could not be more wrong - C suppots pocedural, and can be coerced to support OOP in a limited way. Functional is far more than just having fuctions in the language - Haskell is an example of a language that supports the functional paradigm.

I'm very thankful for u for reading it completely and attentively. thank u so much... i hope i cud improve it and I spent two long weeks in this, inspite of crushing obsi and recs, I don't just do copy and paste jobs....

i .and the register/static variable thing I'm confused. help me there.
ii. i started this with microcontrollers in mind - forgot to mention this.
iii. i thought recursion was not important.

I hope u cud understand wat i meant...

Sorry to say but these two points show how much you need to learn before you try to teach others.

I understand u hav huge exp, but i need to say,

*recursion need more stack slots , that is not feasible in micro controller in which the memory is in terms of bytes to few KBs...
* what I meant by that first statement is "whats is ur point?"...

So if you are ruling out recursion because of the target platform/architecture - then make that very clear.

Firstly, there's no indication which "page" is first. I had to guess at the order.
This "book" is horribly presented. The positioning of blocks of text on the left and right of each image doesn't give any clear indication in which order they are supposed to be read.
C does not have call-by-reference. It does, however, have pointers which are completely different.
There's absolutely no mention of abstract data types at all.

Functions are a fundamental concept in C programming and in most computer languages and certainly in maths.

The term "functional programming" is used in an extremely broad sense, even so it has become associated with computer languages where (amongst other features) functions are side-effect free. Meaning that their evaluation can't change the environment of computation.

You can program in C applying a functional style throughout. C has function pointers and the use of global variables can be minimized, there's even a book called Functional C.

Still the functional languages represent a different style and philosophy of the process of programming and it could be confusing to your readers if you don't qualify how you are referring to "functional programming" in C.

It is too much to convert the pictures into a single pdf or html file? Html file would be better - you can take advantage of those .gifs.

The flow of reading is a little bit odd. You have two irregular columns, which in my opinion would be improved if they would have each equal widths. Also you should be consistent about the value main() returns: during your pictures it returns either an int or a void (hint - int). Also if you put the pictures into a single pdf file you may want to refrain yourself from putting the part which refers to your blog (the upper part in your picture) because it contains many nonfunctional elements: like what is the purpose of a search box and links to various parts of your website? They are just pixels in the final image - they don't serve any purpose because you can't use them to navigate or to search something on your website. My advice would be to put your work into a single html file and redesign the upper part so it wouldn't look like a screendump of your blog. A discrete link to your website would probably be enough publicity.

I don't know much C - but I subscribe to what @Barrucadu said - you don't have true call by reference in C. I found this myself several months ago. You see, when you pass a pointer as a parameter to a function, the value (as in called by value) that is copied it is the pointed address - now you have the copy of that address inside the function passed by call by value. However, the copy of the address points to the same memory location as the pointer passed as a parameter to the function.

If you change the values located in the memory pointed by the copy of the pointer inside the function you change the values pointed by the copy and the pointer passed as a parameter. If you would like to change the address (i.e. have a new location of the memory associated with the passed pointer) the copy points to, you wouldn't succeed - it would change only inside the function. The pointer passed to the function wouldn't change for the same reason a call by value does not change the parameter passed to a function. When the function ends that local copy of the pointer is unreachable (unless you return it). Hope I make some sense.

One thing I want to make clear is this is not C-book. It is about basic programming stuff.
Thanks for ur time guys. I owe u much. and I was wrong to mention that C supports Functional Paradigm. But I'm just making it for Programming(particularly aimed at microcontrollers) and not Programming in C. and about the layout I' should consider them on next version.

@PeterP24 : yes you are right. to modify a variable, you can pass its address, so it cud be manipulated. so to modify a pointer, we have to pass a pointer to the pointer. that is called reference pointer. hope this makes sense too. 

god job guys.. its really helpful for me...

Post a Comment

தங்களது கருத்துக்களை இங்கே வெளியிடவும்...

Share

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More