Dan Gookin
5 February 2019 ·
Fan mail today from Belgium. People are still reading my books during their commute.
I found that odd back in the 1990s, when people would tell me they enjoyed leafing through "DOS For Dummies" while riding the subway. Apparently "Beginning Programming with C For Dummies" has the same charm - and in Brussels.
39You, Richard Sexton and 37 others
21 comments
Ken De Vries "Beginning Programmin with C." LOL! C isn't a language for beginners. 😉

Richard Sexton It was for me. Once you know assembler all higher level languages are trivial, they're just shorthand. I'd suggest C is the perfect beginner language. Not C++, that deserves to die in fire, plain C.
There is less stuff to remember than any other language and youcan do anything with it.
In the 50 years since it was invented the only thing better to come along is Javascript, wichis C with some additions of stuff from other languages made for the web.
It's funny really because Unix was invented because the thing that was supposed to do this- multics, was an unholy disaster and died made by committee.
Javascript was invented became the thing thatr was supposed to do this in the browser - Java - was an unholy disaster and died, made by committee. Node happened when a 17 yer old kid made JS run on a server. It replaced Java. Two guys at Bell did C and unix, one guy at Netscape did javascript. One guy at Opera did CSS. html was from sgml whuch was from Scribe which one guy wrote.
No software product from a commute ever succeeded.
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Ken De Vries I wrote whole applications in 8086 Assembly. Been a software consultant for 30+ years. I hated C and C++. C++ was 10x worse than C.
I liked the .NET Microsoft languages while I was still doing that for a living.
Funny that you liked JavaScript. Ihated client side development when doing web work. I finally told my clients I was not going to do any more clientside code and I stuck with all the server side stuff.
Web applications now are al about chasing browser standards - another thing I hate. I am glad to be out of software.
Dan Gookin Z80 assembly. I finally figured out pointers when someone explained, "Oh that's just bracket notation in assembly." Done.
Richard Sexton See, the nice thing is if you know C you are equally comfortable on both sides. Dan I had that moment on an ibm 1130 in school.… LD *-* would load the contents of locion zero into the acc LD 2 *-* would load the contents of location 0 plus R2 into the acc LD I2 *-* would load the contents of the word t the location specified by the word at the address zero plus R2 into the acc There were only three registers, but this sort of architecture was literally an outlier from all other IBM instruction sets. these could do recursions but not reentrance. The PDP 8 and 11 were next for me, the 11 made sense ans still has the best instruction set ever devised by man. It's never been improved and only got worse. the x86 garbage is one of the worst ever. Segments are for worms. 1
Ken De Vries "Segments are for worms." LOL! Yea, but that's what I cut my teeth on.
Dan Gookin Segments were nothing, try page swapping with EMS. 1
Ken De Vries Forget it. I sell Real Estate now. Done with programming!

Richard Sexton Dan Gookin That didn't even work on CP/M. we have some 256K memory boards, 64K chunks. system was rom based. I thought "oh cool, I can make a ramdisk and put the editor and the files I'm editing in there" just like I did at home on an Amiga years later. So I wrote a ramdisk driver, added it to the rom and every time you used it the parity error light came on. You can't actually do that in software, that's a hardware fault. All the boards did this. I'm not sure how they were tested. Did anybody ever use it? I don't think I ever saw a working ramdisk in cp/m.
Brianne Toma My brain hurt with that title. Programmers are amazing.
Ken De Vries Dan, you should have written one caled Idaho Politics for Dummies and handed it out to all of the Legislators. 1
Ken De Vries replied · 2 replies
John Austin You never know what wisdom Brussels sprouts.. 2
Dan Gookin replied
· 1 reply
Deborah Rose It's no surprise, Dan, you have international appeal.
Jan Pniewski I really could not get my head around C till I read your C for Dummies book. 1
David Solomon media1.tenor.co
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David Solomon You are too humble, my freind! Your works enabled millions to join the rising tide of technology. I am convinced that your contributions can go beyond technology. Salute! 1
Kiva Neufeld I still remember laying my eyes on "PC's for Dummies" for the first time, reading the back of the book and going, "Oh my gosh, I KNOW him!!!" You have done the whole world a service, my friend! 1
Teak Wood When is"Writing for dummies coming out Dan"
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