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Message: [QUOTE="John Bode, post: 5161857"] Normally, C makes a *lousy* teaching language because it assumes you know what you are doing at all times. That's a bad assumption to make for experienced programmers, much less for people just starting out. Ed Post described TECO as a "you asked for it, you got it" editor (as opposed to "what you see is what you get"). C follows a similar philosophy, and won't necessarily warn you when you're doing something stupid. Think of C as a power tool with no blade guards, and just be aware that it *will* cut you at some point. However, since you're interested in systems-level programming, C is a good language to learn, since it exposes a lot of low-level concepts. It makes you aware of how your data maps to memory (at least at the conceptual level). It also makes you aware of memory as a limited resource. The main drawback of learning C first is that it wires you into thinking in low-level terms (not like assembler, but still...); this can be a hinderance when learning languages like Haskell, or even Java. A secondary drawback is that most C references are *crap*. A lot of bad practice and misinformation has metastasized in most books and tutorials. C provides no standard containers beyond arrays. For anything more complicated (queues, stacks, trees, dictionaries, etc.), you'll have to roll your own or find a third-party library. The benefit of rolling your own is that you learn how such containers work, and how different implementation strategies have different performance. The drawback is that you have to write, test, and debug all that code along with the code that works the actual problem. As for resources, my go-to desktop reference is Harbison & Steele's "C: A Reference Manual", currently 5th edition. Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language", 2nd ed., is somewhat long in the tooth (doesn't cover C99), but is still a good introduction. Although I haven't used it myself, King's "C Programming: A Modern Approach" is recommended by people I trust. An online draft of the latest C standard (C 2011), is available at [URL]http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf[/URL] On its own it's not a great *learning* resource, but as you become more familiar with the language it will be invaluable. For my part, I don't do systems programming; I'm a dumb applications programmer who makes maybe one or two systems calls per project, usually to create a thread or something. I've never worked an OS kernel, so I can't give any guidance in that area. [/QUOTE]

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