I'm reading the Advanced Programming in Unix Environment to do system level coding. I know one way to learn coding is to read other people's code first. I looked at a few open source projects (written in C) but they all seem pretty daunting; I don't even know where to begin. There's no main.c or anything like that. I don't understand 95% of the codes & find the whole process confusing. However, I have learned to use gcc, lint, gdb very well.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.

This may seem a strange qn but it's not clear from your qn; how much C have you done ie written ie time / lines of code?

personally, i find reading a wad of code not very useful at all until you know what you are doing. Otherwise as you say it's a muddle.
Have you got Kernighan and Ritchie?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_P...anguage_(book)

The only way to learn is to do.

So i suggest you use the examples in your books
and fiddle about and experiment.
get used to using a debugger too so you can see what it all looks like.
ddd is a very nice debugging tool which works on top of native debuggers.

Hi Chris

Over the years I have written approximately 1000 lines of C code. This includes basic hello world, structures, pointers, enums, #DEFINEs etc. etc. I have also learned how compilers work, gcc, ldd, linkers, gdb, make etc. along the way.

Thanks. Yes. I bought K&R many moons ago and read bits and pieces from this book. I will definitely try to solve all the examples from this book and will also try out ddd.

well you must remember, any non trivial project has had probably hundreds and hundreds of
man hours spent on it. Even superman couldn't grasp it in one sitting now could he?

allegedly linux has 60 million lines of code.
at one line a minute to read that's 11 years solid reading.

it's like being annoyed because you could not build the golden gate bridge on your own



edit: oops 6 million, so thats only a year to read then!!!

Bargain, cheap at twice the price.

You could take a small Open Source project, get it running and then start changing small parts of it. Whilst that is really just an academic exercise it will help you more than just reading the code. By small I mean small, you've written 1000 loc, so try and find something of that size. Maybe a linux command like cat would be a good starting point, having no idea how big it is, I could be wrong but I bet it's easier than grep

I tried going that route once. The problem is that all the coreutils share headers, functions and whatnot, so all the single command's code gets intermingled within. It is very frustrating to read, say, 'cat.c' and find it is fifteen lines long, and calls all its functional code from ~20 other files...

However, if you take the time to sort it out there is little doubt that it will educate you.

That said, I have personally rewritten a few of the coreutils from scratch in C as an educational exercise. So far I have uptime, free, cat, and rm.