Learn C the Hard Way – making things useful

Ex 15. Slowed down by altering my system clock and having to stop to deal with that. In fact, the time it took me (no wireless, no wired internet, one small-screened phone) was probably not worth it. I’d have been better off waiting an hour. Modification times are not my friend.

Also not my friend: my brain. I need projects I can use all this new knowledge on. I learn best by doing things and multi-tentacling my brain. That’s like multi-threading, but more muscular, and also rather disgusting. But I need a set of short, easy things that are useful, and that I can do. I’m happier with electronics because I’m working towards a project, but while you can create a project out of logic chips that someone hands you, it’s a lot harder to create a program out of functions that exist. Nobody’s handing me the functions, and choice paralysis is creeping in. It helps that Zed’s adding in independent research and ‘go break this’ and the Extra Credit section – I’m taking those as my projects pro tem, but I’d also really like Stuff To Do. I might look at Arduino projects and what I can do with them. I started learning for Sparky, but once I had that part of the project dealt with, I didn’t have anything else to make the jump between theoretical and ‘wow this is useful’.

So I can probably make the LED array into genuine arrays. I’ll be able to read Mat’s bit of code for the logical read-out to the Serial Monitor, and I can have a minimal physical output plus a proper electronic output. It’ll be a nice break for my brain.

Ooh. Shiny!