I first started fiddling about with C when I became a Linux user. I had done some previous hobby programming; like many people back in the 1970's, I started with BASIC, moved on to Fortran and then Pascal, which I particularly liked because of its logical structure.

In all these languages, a variable was simply a named entity that had a type (for example integer) and a value. You did not have to bother about where it was stored. The computer handled that for you. These languages were...

Many people, after using Linux for a while, get the programming bug. I doubt if that often happens to Windows users, but Linux offers such convenient tools for writing programs that it tempts you to put one toe into the water.

Here are one or two tips that you might want to follow to make programming less stressful and confusing. I have chosen C as the language because it's one I know something about. Most of what I want to say applies just as much to C++. Some of it probably applies...