What good book on the C language (as for a dummy/beginner) do you
recommend?
Hi Andreas,
I'd suggest "The C Programming Language" by Dennis Ritchie
supplemented with other books and online tutorials for particular
areas of interest. Ritchie is the principal author of the C language
and the book is a somewhat formal description of it. Considering its
spawn (C++, Objective-C, unix operating systems, etc.) this slim
volume can be considered pivotal in late 20th century thought. Since
you already have a lot of AppleScript, you'll probably find this book
more accessible than someone starting out since certain concepts are
fundamental to all computer languages.
For the supplementary books, since there are so many of them, it's
best to find an author whose writing style you enjoy. For instance I
don't enjoy books with crappy Windows style typesetting and bitmap
cartoon character icons for "Note" and "Important" sidebars.
For bitwise operations, there are terse explanations on pages 48 and
149 of The C Programming Language, and many brilliant implementations
in code dealing with MIDI, compression, and image processing.
Other important areas are algorithms and data structures (google "c
algorithms and data structures"). In particular how the C language
'struct' container with type-defined functions is a basis for object
centric thought.
