New Meetup Group: Business People Who Code

I just organized a new meetup group called Business People Who Code.  Here’s the basic premise as I described it on the Meetup website for the group:

The name of this group is a bit of an oxymoron. After all, everyone knows business people can’t write code and those who code don’t understand business. This group is designed to challenge those assumptions. If you’re a business person who wants to learn programming, you’ve come to the right place. And if you’re a programmer who feels pigeon holed, this group is a good place to network yourself over to the business side.

For our first series of events we’re going to organize a study group for anyone interested in learning the C programming language.

So far the response has been great (26 members and counting including some familiar faces from NYTM & NextNY) despite my having invested very little effort thus far in promoting it.  I’m looking forward to our first event!

http://www.meetup.com/business-people-who-code

Recap of first Business People Who Code Meetup

On August 5th we held our first ever Business People Who Code Meetup event. The event was an Introduction to C Programming and it was the first of what will hopefully be a series of events designed to teach programming skills to business people and business skills to programmers.

Here’s my long overdue recap of the event…

APPRECIATION
Thanks Frank Yee for volunteering to teach C programming to all us newbies. This is what this group is all about, members stepping up to share their skills and expertise with others.

Thanks Iliya Fridman and Fridman Law Group for hosting us. You have an awesome space.

Thanks also to everyone who attended.

TOPICS COVERED

  • Why learn C —- Frank spoke eloquently on the topic, but in case you missed it here’s an article that makes a pretty good case for learning C as your first programming language.
  • Installing GCC and compiling your first program —- you can’t compile an executable program without a compiler. GCC is the most widely used and it’s completely open source. Click here to download and install it.
  • Writing a first program —- In our first example we learned about standard libraries (e.g. stdio.h), variables, printf and arrays. Be sure you’re familiar with these topics before the next Meetup.

RESOURCES

  • Frank recommended a great text book for learning C. I’ll link to it here once I get the name.
  • How Stuff Works published a solid beginners tutorial that is a must-read.

THINGS I LEARNED

After Frank’s lecture, a lot of self-study and some trial and error, I wrote and compiled a little program that actually does something useful.  It’s a quiz engine that asks three simple questions about programming in C. The source code appears below. Try typing it into your text editor and compiling it.  It really works!

All of the questions and answers are in the code, so it’s clearly not a scalable quiz engine. One wouldn’t want to have to edit source code and recompile the program just to change the questions and answers. Therefore my next task will be to figure out how to load the quiz data from an external file.  Perhaps we’ll even cover that during the next Meetup. Sign up today!

Explaining “int main (int argc, const char * argv[])”

In my quest to teach myself C, I’ve started every program with the same basic function “main()”.

For example,

#include <stdio.h>

main()

{

printf(“Hello World”);

}

So I was puzzled when I began using Xcode on the Mac.  Xcode begins every new C project with the following as the main function

“int main(int argc, const char * argv[])”

You’re probably wondering what the difference is and so was I.  So I turned to Google and found the answer.  The parameter argc is the argument count at the time the program is invoked.  For example, if your program was called “dan” and you typed “dan one two” into the command line the computer would execute dan.exe after passing “one” and “two” into the program.  The value stored in the program for argc would be 3 (including the program name).  The parameter argv on the other hand is the actual array of arguments. In our example the array of arguments would be

argv[0] = “dan”

argv[1] = “one”

argv[2] = “two”

It’s pretty common to pass arguments into a program when invoking it.  Therefore it makes sense that Xcode adds these parameters to the main function by default.  I’m glad I learned that.