On July 8th, 2008, I'll be giving a talk at the Wheaton branch of Polyglot Programmers. It will be the same talk I'll be giving a few weeks later at OSCON: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3050
This session will provide a high-level overview of C, aimed specifically at the programmer wanting to get involved in a C-based open source project.
We'll cover:
* Numeric types, strings and structures
* Memory management: the heap, the stack, and pointers
* Using the preprocessor
* Understanding compiler warnings
* Memory checking with valgrind
* How to navigate a large C-based open source project (ctags, etc)
* Security, or, how the Bad Guys smash the stack
Although Perl 5 is written in C, I will NOT be getting into specifics of Perl 5 internals, so if that's what you're interested in, please don't be disappointed.
Andy Lester (http://perlbuzz.com) is the lead programmer for Book Wholesalers Inc, (http://bwibooks.com/). He's active in the Parrot, Perl 6 and Perl 5 projects, and maintains over a dozen testing-related modules. His current non-code project is a book for Pragmatic Bookshelf on job search strategies for programmers, sysadmins and other technical people.
IIT Rice Campus
Room 103
201 East Loop Road
Wheaton, IL 60187-8489
Directions to IIT - Rice Campus in Wheaton From the North or South: From I-355 (North-South Tollway), exit westbound at Rt.56/Butterfield Road and proceed west 3 1/2 miles on Butterfield Road to East Loop Road. Turn right onto East Loop Road (Phillip's 66 Gas Station on the corner); the campus will be on your right about a block north of Butterfield Road, behind Cozymel's. Park in the Student parking lot behind the building. Room 103 is the first room inside the north entrance.
From the I-294 (Tri-State Tollway), take the I-88 (East-West Tollway) westbound and follow directions "From the East or West" below.
From the East or West: From I-88 (East-West Tollway), take the Naperville Road exit. At the traffic light, turn left onto Naperville Road and continue north for 1\275 miles to Rt. 56/Butterfield Road. Turn right onto Rt. 56/Butterfield Road and proceed 1/4 mile to the first traffic light (East Loop Road). Turn left on to East Loop Road, ( Phillip's 66 Gas station on the corner); the campus will be on your right about a block north of Butterfield Road, behind Cozymel's. Park in the Student parking lot behind the building.
Room 103 is the first room inside the north entrance.Contact Dave Hoover at dave@obtiva.com for additional information about the meeting or about Polyglot Programmers.
For more information about UniForum Chicago contact info@UniforumChicago.org.