Re: Book questions
On Monday, April 13, 2015 at 12:30:03 PM UTC+5:30, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 09:35:25 -0700
> David Christensen wrote:
>
> > On 04/12/2015 01:33 AM, Petter Adsen wrote:> OK, thank you, I will
> > definitely consider Perl also, as I already know
> > > a little and have a few books on it.
> >
> > I'd advise learning one language well, where "well" includes security
> > best practices. Understand that learning any modern language takes a
> > lot of time and effort. So pick one that is good at solving the
> > kinds of problems that you are motivated to work on, because the
> > going will get tough and you'll have to find the tenacity to struggle
> > through.
>
> I can see the logic in that. The issue with that is that I need them
> for two separate things - I want to learn C to get a deeper
> understanding of how Linux works, and I was initially thinking about
> Python for sysadmin tasks that I can't or don't know how to do in shell
> scripts.
One way to fry a brain is to learn C.
Another way to fry the brain is to struggle with regular expressions.
Unless you like a double-fried brain I suggest doing strictly one at a time.
20+ years ago I wrote a rant on why teaching (and ∴ learning) C causes grief:
http://blog.languager.org/2013/02/c-in-education-and-software-engineering.html
In one way it shows a lot of traps and pitfalls of beginners.
It also recommends better paradigms than C for learning programming.
If python had existed then I would have recommended it.
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