On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Dwayne Reid wrote: > Good day to all. > > I am attending Microchip Masters for the first time and am seeking advice= .. > > One of the courses offered during the Pre-conference is a two day > "Introduction to the C Programming Language" course. > > I don't currently write in C. I've tried several times to learn it > on my own (Type and Learn "C", etc) but my brain just doesn't 'get' it. > > I'm not a great programmer but I do reasonably well in Assembler - > both for the PIC family and the TI MSP430 family. I first cut my > teeth learning to program the PDP-11 in school, then the Motorola > 6800 family several years later. All in Assembler, of course. Never > did get into the 8051 family, though. > > My question is: is it worth dedicating those first two days of the > conference to this "Introduction to C" course? That would mean > missing some other courses that I am really interested in taking. > > No. It's not worth it. You can learn C pretty much anywhere, but best learned alone, by yourself. I believe the programming language, as in the syntax itself is pretty simple. The annoying part is learning how to use different frameworks and libraries, but that won't be a problem for PIC C programming, if that's wha= t you're looking into. > I really do want to learn to work with C - I think that its a > valuable tool that will help greatly over the remainder of my > career. What I don't know is how well Microchip teaches that course. > In my opinion, probably not any better than anyone else. Kinda like how som= e stupid parents send their kids to expensive private kindergarten, or elementary school, or middle school, or high school. At that level, the school doesn't really matter and it's probably not taugh= t better at A vs. B. I believe learning is up to you. Specifically, what part of C don't you understand? Just the whole idea of it? Maybe it would help if you somehow saw the relationship between your C code and the generated assembler. But I don't know about disassembling your binary or looking at the generated intermediate assembler. It's more than likely not optimized enough or optimized too much or funny how the compute= r does it. > Advice appreciated. > > "So many choices, so little time" . > > dwayne > --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .