Can Novices Jump Directly in C? (Books)

[David Tanguay]

In article <431 at bria> uunet!bria!mike writes:
>I personally found [K&R] to be an _excellent_ book when learning C.  One of
>the things that I greatly dislike in many of the C books that are out today
>is the focus on cute pictures and sayings (here is a how a structure is
>declared, see the cute little elf holding up the structure in the diagram ...)

I, too, very much appreciated K&R's brevity when I first learned C.
I think it is a good book to learn C from. It may not be so good to learn
programming from. (Which did the original poster want?)

>One of the big complaints is
>that the concept of the pointer is overwhelming to C neophytes.  The
>reason why is because so many other langauges go through great contortions
>to "insulate" you from the reality of memory and addresses. 

I originally learned B (although C followed soon thereafter). I never had
any problems with the concept of a pointer, or pointer arithmetic: in fact,
they seemed quite natural. So I don't think teaching beginners about
pointers will be a problem (if they truly are beginners). It may not be
the right thing to do (many see pointers as EVIL), but if your students
haven't been "poisoned" by Pascal or Basic it should be a fairly easy
concept to get across.
-- 
David Tanguay            Software Development Group, University of Waterloo