New C Developer

Hi everybody,

I hope I am posting in the right place and also hope beginners are welcome on the forum (I know some places are for experts etc only).

After years and years of web development using mainly PHP, I really want to get stuck into a language such as C and have been reading as much as possible recently.

I was hoping you could help me with a few initial queries I have and of course as I pick up, I will do my part in the forum.

The first thing is that I notice C data types reserve a different level of storage depending on the system they are installed upon, for example an int on a 64 bit machine could reserve 64 bits compared to an int on a 16 bit system reserving 16 bits for an int. This makes me think that the same program running on a different machine uses different levels of storage which makes me wonder how software developers can put recommended specs on their software when they may not be sure which type of system the program is running on.

The second item I have is that when I first looked at C, that must have been around 10+ years ago and I never fully got into it. How relevant is C today? I know C is what many popular current languages are based on however C itself I am completely in the dark over, no idea if its the best thing possible to learn or if I am heading down the wrong path here.

And finally (sorry - I know I will get some replies saying I am wasting people's time here), as I am coming from a web background, I am struggling to think of programs to build in C that will progressively challenge my learning, with web I can build a website, build an online CRM and so on, with C in a console window, I have no idea what to try and build really other than items such as calculators etc. I've googled for project suggestions however it mainly discusses c++ which I do not want to touch until I have properly covered C.

Thanks to anybody that helps, and as I say, hope I am posting in the right area and the right forum.

Thanks!

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The first thing is that I notice C data types reserve a different level of storage depending on the system they are installed upon, for example an int on a 64 bit machine could reserve 64 bits compared to an int on a 16 bit system reserving 16 bits for an int. This makes me think that the same program running on a different machine uses different levels of storage which makes me wonder how software developers can put recommended specs on their software when they may not be sure which type of system the program is running on.

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That would only matter if you were allocating gobs of space for these types. Even if you're allocating, say, 100,000 integers, that's something like 400K vs 800K if you're worried about 32- and 64-bit systems. That's just about meaningless on modern systems. Anybody who does make recommendations for system requirements is probably going to a) build binaries themselves so they'll know how big integers are and/or b) estimate high, anyway.

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How relevant is C today?

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If you're doing development in POSIX land (e.g. FreeBSD, Linux, etc), it's still very prevalent. I think OS X is more tilted toward Objective C and Windows toward C++ and maybe C#, but don't quote me on those. C is certainly not the programming language the way it used to be, but it's still quite used in certain areas.

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mainly discusses c++ which I do not want to touch until I have properly covered C.

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If your goal is to learn C++, then forget C. There's no need to learn C beforehand, and it'll give you bad habits for C++. If you want to learn C, of course, that's fine, but I wouldn't recommend it as a stepping-stone to C++.

As for projects, I don't imagine there's any harm in implementing the C++ projects you find in C; at least some of them have to be general enough to be done in many languages.