I think for the month of March I'm going to try an experiment. Something that I've long wanted to do, but something that has gone by the wayside more often than not.

I'm going to read through Kernighan and Ritchie's classic book "The C Programming Language".

I liken this to reading books when you're younger vs. when you're older. "The Lord of the Rings" is a great example of this. When I read it as a youngster it was a mystical and fanciful world. When I re-read it (around the time of the movies) it started off mystical and fanciful but with my older eyes I could see things I'd missed before. I'd missed what Tom Bombadil represented (though I still do not care for that character in the slightest). I'd missed that the over-arching theme is that the world of magic is still dying, and that the quest of the ring was whether it ended in fire or in quiet contemplation.

So what does this have to do with K&R?

First off it's a classic text of programming. You can't mention the C language without someone piping up "K&R". As I mentioned in the last post there's also a certain comfort in hanging around in the C language. Plus I've never read the book all the way through. Something always happened to keep me from reading the book and I feel that I've done it a disservice by not making my way through all of the pages. Plus I'm not the same programmer that I was back then. I've grown with wisdom and I understand more of how computers work. Granted the version of C they present is not modern C, but I have other books to help me make that transition. And GCC / GDB are much better tools than when I last played with them.

How far will I get? Who can say? But I feel like I have to try.