MPPB-002: The C Language

Oh yes, you're going to teach yourself the entire C language in a week..... NOT.

C is an intricate language that has a lot of power and flexibility but expresses itself rather tersely (on the COBOL scale). Most of the participants in the course expressed reasonable skill with the language, but for those who aren't so strong in it or are totally unfamiliar with it, take heart. You WILL need to pick up a proficiency in the language as we progress and will definitely need to be self-sufficient by the time you're programming the customized parts of your application, but as i've said elsewhere, Power Plant and the other pieces of the CW development environment do a LOT of the work for you in building a Mac OS application.

Our earliest efforts will be on discussing the Mac OS and Toolbox, Resources, Power Plant's structure and use, how to use the tools in the development environment, debugging techniques,etc. none of which require any code to be written. When we do start building our applications, the initial parts of that exercise will be in designing the application and then in building the user interface. Because PP and Constructor work together to produce most of the user interface without requiring any "original" coding, this means that our participants will have months of time to work on learning C and can pick its use up by looking at examples as we go. The example programs written by K.J.Bricknell which accompany the MOST Mac OS Core course provide Mac OS specific examples of the use of the C language and are a prime place to go for students who want to experiment with using the language in the Mac OS/CodeWarrior environment

For those who would like to start working on the C language now, i present you with Lesson 2 of this project :-). We have another product of K.J.'s available directly on our site, the "Essence of C" text. This materials is NOT sufficient on its own to teach the C language. K.J.'s intention when writing this text was to produce a summary of the features of the language, NOT to provide a self-sufficient study guide. Participants in this course are encouraged to use other, more comprehensive materials to help them master C, but let's use the structure of K.J.'s text to organize our discussion for this lesson.

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