I am into C (yea, not SHE)!

One of the subjects in a first year of IT graduates in Gujarat University is C language programming and it seems students find C language programming very difficult. 8 out of 10 students in Akshar's class are attending private tuition to learn C language and Akshar too felt the need for the same. The fee of this tuition is about Rs. 5000 and the course is of just two weeks... "Ridiculous" was the word when I came to know about this.

C has been my favorite language always and I was "possessed" by it during my graduation time. In my time, C language was fairly new language and was a final year subject. We learned BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL in fourth and fifth semester but I went out of way and started learning C on my own in parallel with PASCAL. Since there was many similarities between PASCAL and C, my learning sailed smooth and I was able to stay ahead of other students. Recursive procedures and pointers were my favorites and I always had a competition with P about writing most optimized code. We used to compare the size of the final executable code and fight on to make it minimum. I remember an incident when my code for a compiler was a bit lengthy then her code and she left no chance to brag about it. C++ was still not visible on any horizons of my university when I finished my graduation in 1990 and it was still Windows 3.11 in the beginning of 1992 when I got Borland's C++ compiler. Soon, C++ overpowered C and the whole world changed. Around 1993, Windows programming became affordable and I spent a huge amount to import "Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold from America. Visual C and Visual C++ were born later to continue the ease of programming and the SDK for Windows was no longer needed. Optimization of the code became the history with abundance of RAM and hard disk space. Then C# surfaced and Tcl/Tkl is playing substantial role too.

When I took up the task of teaching C language to Akshar, it was like recalling the past - 1987 era when I started learning C... After more then 20 years, I still have the same passion and the fascination for C (and SHE too?) and I still love C (and not SHE)! Incidentally, the books I used during my graduation - "C made easy" by Herbert Schildt and "The C Programming Language" by K&R, I gave to Nishant as he too was pursuing IT engineering. When Akshar joined IT engineering, Nishant passed those books to him and they finally ended up in my hands when I needed to check some reference!!! Once Akshar is well versed with C, I intend to teach him C++ and C# and if time permits, I would like him to know enough about Tcl/Tkl before I become not available. He should be able to learn Java on his own if he picks up C++ well.

I also intend to teach him some of my bad skills and if you want to join, brush up your knowledge about TCP/IP and seven layers of network architecture. Don't complain later that I did not keep my words.