[BusyBox] Suggested reading....

[Matt Kraai]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 05:00:58PM -0500, Tom Cameron wrote:
> 	I have some spare time coming up soon, and I would like to begin
> learning how to actually program something useful in C.  Anyone have any
> suggestions for books?  Basically, what I want is to be able to start
> programming for projects like BusyBox and/or uClibc, amongst others...but
> I'd also like to be able to write custom stuff for personal projects.  If
> anyone know of a good book to pick up, please let me know!  I already have
> programmed stupid things in DOS, so I understand most of the concepts and
> things such as includes and declarations of variables, etc...but a refresher
> would be nice.  Anyway, let me know, and thanks in advance!

Going progressively further afield:

The best book on C that I ever read was _Lions' Commentary on UNIX
6th Edition_ by John Lions.  It is actually about operating
systems, but you'll learn more about C (and the way it should be
used) from it than from any other book I've read.

The second best book is _The C Programming Language_ by Brian W.
Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.  It's an invaluable reference to
help convince yourself that you, and not the compiler, are at
fault.

The third best text is the C library manual (available online
everywhere).  The C library has some pretty neat functions if you
poke around long enough.  And many of them behave in non-intuitive
ways.

Finally (and somewhat circularly, as you'll discover), source
code, which is both the most difficult and most instructive text.

Matt