How many of us have those fond memories of daring to write more than 20 lines of code without compiling just to get a taunting blinking cursor of bash right below segmentation fault. Oh, the nostalgia!

But for real, C seems to work against you! It lures you with its minuscule 32 keywords and then it shoots you on the back with * and &.

I don't know if it's because I like pain or I still idolize the time of vi running on Slackware back in the day of Kernel 2.2 and ext2 constantly breaking but I finally decided to take the jump into C.

What I've been "discovering" is that the beauty of C is that it doesn't try to hide many details from the system you are running the program. It assumes you know what you are doing, and my that, you know what things can be stored on L1 or in RAM! I guess it is true that with greater power comes greater responsibility.

The reason why I'm learning C (I'm a web dev in love with JS and React, and Rust makes my heart flutter!) is because Linux. I have used Linux for years and now I want to go deeper, syscalls and kernel and such. And even in higher levels we are still C territory with gstreamer and Glib and Gtk+ and libssl, and readline and wayland and...

C is still King and Lord in many low level Linux world.

Learning it in 2019 seems kind of like a challenge since you seems to find two camps, one says "C is Punk Rock" (21st Century C) while the other camps says to not dare a keyboard before reading K&R2. One wants you to develop high-level stuff with C and a bunch of libraries, while the other tells you how to store things on L1, which is 200x to RAM.

Anyways, I'm really enjoying learning more about systems from the amazing tlpi book. Any suggestions, ideas or resources would be more than welcome!

Thanks for reading :-)