C book club for R contributors

This is a book club meeting every two weeks for existing/aspiring R contributors that want to learn/refresh their C programming skills.

It will run from May to August 2023, so that people attending R Project Sprint 2023 have at least a basic understanding of C and how it interfaces with R. However, you do not have to be a sprint participant to join the book club!

Readings

Our main reading will be Modern C by Jens Gustedt. A PDF is available for free download, or there is a 35% discount code for a print or eBook copy (see the Modern C website). This book is organized in levels:

0 - Encounter: summarizes the very basics of programming with C.
1 - Acquaintance: details most principal concepts and features such as control structures, data types, operators, and functions.
2 - Cognition: goes to the heart of the C language, covering pointers, C’s memory model, and most of C’s library interface.
3 - Experience: goes into detail about specific topics, such as performance, reentrancy, atomicity, threads, and type-generic programming.

This book club will cover levels 0 to 2 (about 200 pages).

The reading will be supplemented with:

Selected exercises from C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King (shared under fair use).
The chapter on R's C interface from Advanced R (1st ed.) by Hadley Wickham (free online).

Commitment

There are three levels of commitment:

Low (1-2 hrs/wk): Read the assigned readings, work through the examples in the main text and participate in the online meetings every two weeks.
Medium (2-3 hrs/wk, recommended): Same as Low, but also try (some of) the selected exercises.
High (~1 day/wk): Same as Medium, but also try (some of) the challenges in Modern C.

At the online meetings, one book club member will present a summary of the chapter (~10 minutes), reviewing the main points and highlighting any quotes/examples they found particularly helpful/important. This will be followed by discussion, sharing exercise solutions, etc. Book club members are encouraged to sign up to present at one session to spread the load among the group.

Timing

Book club meetings will be on Tuesdays (UTC). A poll will be run on the R Contributors Slack with a closing date of 18 April, 2023 to set the time. Meetings will be recorded and shared on the Slack #book-club-modern-c channel.

If a good time can not be found, will we organize the "meeting" asynchonously on the R Contributors Slack and update this page with how this will work.

Schedule

Please sign up to present at one of the sessions, by making a PR to this page. Links to exercises will be added in due course.

No.	Date	Level	Book	Chapters	Page count	Topic(s)	Presenter
1	May 16	0	Modern C	1-3	28	Compiling & running, program structure, flow control	Heather Turner
2	May 30	1	Modern C	4-5	36	Arithmetic & logical operators, data types
3	Jun 13	1	Modern C	6-7	25	Derived data types, functions
4	Jun 27	1	Modern C	8-10	31	C library functions, style, organization & documentation
5	Jul 11	1.5	Advanced R (1st ed)	20	20	R's C interface
6	Jul 25	2	Modern C	11-12	27	Pointers & the C memory model
7	Aug 15	2	Modern C	13	20	Storage
8	Aug 22	2	Modern C	14	19	More involved processing & IO

August Bonus Exercise

This exercise is recommended for August, when there is not so much to do in the main schedule. You might do the two parts separately, whenever you have time. Getting set up to build R from source can take some time, especially on Windows and MacOS. This is an exercise in building R, making a change to the C code and rebuilding to test the change.