Comments on new Kelley and Pohl /A Book on C/, other C teaching stuff

[John R. Dudeck]

In article <3090 at bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> cjoslyn at bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn) writes:
>>If you
>>go into a lot of detail about pointers (include files,preprocessor) too early
>>you may (IMHO _will_) confuse a good portion of your students and they will
>>lose time attempting to grasp this concept while they could be profitably
>>learning more basic concepts.

I am a student, not a teacher, but this gives me a great chance to observe
which of my profs are the most effective...

I would like to comment that I think the most effective teaching occurs when
the material is covered in depth of detail, energetically, and in a logical
sequence that does not require the student to figure out unexplained 
constructs.  I also have been helped a lot by the "dissection" approach,
where a code sample is explained construct-by-construct.

I learned C by reading K&R and working the examples, (I bought it when it
sold for $13.95) and from there reading other code, books, and writing
stuff.  Personally I have been very disappointed with most of the books
on C, and still findk K&R to be the most valuable.


-- 
John Dudeck                           "You want to read the code closely..." 
jdudeck at Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu             -- C. Staley, in OS course, teaching 
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549          Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system.