I have been looking for a way to send and receive data using the serial port on a PC. My understanding of C has mainly come from the book "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days" and the majority of my programming experience has been with microcontrollers.
My primary question is, are there any recommendations for how I can proceed to acquire the programming skills to read and write the serial port? None of the recommended C books listed in the FAQ stood out as being helpful. However, I might not even know what I should be looking for. My online searches lead me to very short help discussions that I don't understand. My experience with books has been they go over the same material for beginners, which I consider myself to be. Anything to help bridge the gap of where I am to where I am trying to go would be great.
As a secondary question, after fully understanding the basics of C that "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days" how can I keep my skills growing? Any non-beginner books, or any skills to focus on would be greatly appreciated.
My current PC C compilers are CodeBlocks and Dev-C++.
For microcontrollers I have been using C18.
Currently, I am using WinXP. Is there much of a difference between serial reading and writing with Vista and XP?