learning by reading

i learnt the most when i stopped thinking i needed a youtube video to learn everything. after a point, it’s just not that convenient. you have to read. there’s no other way.

the first thing i read was an article on building a text editor in C, and i’m so glad i did. in just a week, i learnt about memory management, system calls, pointers (finally), unix terminals, escape sequences, and so much more. it blew my mind when i figured out what happens when you press special keys like home, end, or combinations like ctrl + something. i learnt more in that week than i did in the entire year before.

it was the best thing i ever did. and no, there’s no fun (or progress) in just reading it once and copying the source code. tweak it. make it your own. the code was just 1k lines of C in a single file, but i modularized it and learnt about #include guards, translation units (basically c source files), and Makefiles.

the best part? i didn’t have to use any third party library.