Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jpc0 428 days ago
Decades ols books in C most certainly is even useful in modern C++23 because you need to interact with other libraries written in C89.

When a lot of modern CS concepts wwre first discovered and studied in the 70s, there's no point arguing that old books are useless. Honestly there may be sections of old books that are useless but in the whole they are still useful.

1 comments

We're talking about learning C/C++ from scratch which makes no sense to do by using a decades old book because it wouldn't teach you any modern features. Also we're not talking about computer science.
You do not need to know about modern features to write code in C. This is part of computer science.
> You do not need to know about modern features to write code in C.

Then what’s the point of adding any new features?

Some people want to use them, they are useful in some contexts and they often already exist in some form elsewhere, but the majority of people often do not need them.

That said, when you learn a foreign language, you do not learn every word in the dictionary and every grammatical structure. The same is true for programming. You just don't need to have a more up to date book than one on C89 to begin learning C.