Practical Arduino C

“Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams. A clever and perfectly structured comic novel following on from the fantastically successful “Hitchhikers” series of books, radio plays, TV adaptations etc. I would thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy f you have never read it. I am less sure about the second Dirk Gently which is an OK story I suppose but (for me) lacks the Adams magic.

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist of considerable renown but also a teacher, raconteur, occasional safe cracker, programmer and drummer. The web site http://www.feynman.com/ is a good start point to discover more about this extraordinary man. His entertaining autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is well worth tracking down and an Internet search might well turn up an on-line copy.

Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s seminal “The C programming language” introduced the subject of pointers as follows:

Pointers are much used in C, partly because they are sometimes the only way to express a computation, and partly because they usually lead to more compact and efficient code than can be obtained in other ways.
Pointers have been lumped with the goto statement as a marvellous way to create impossible-to-understand programs. This is certainly true when they are used carelessly, and it is easy to create pointers that point somewhere unexpected.

Which puts the case for acquiring pointer skills rather better than the official Arduino documentation even if the quotation contains one of those “awful warnings” that often accompany comments on the C language. To counter those, I would point out that an Arduino is a perfect environment to learn C, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing you can accidentally do that will upset the software and infrastructure of your personal computer.