Standard C library

Both Unix and C were created at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The C programming language, before it was standardized , did not provide built-in functionalities such as I/O operations . By the beginning of the 1980s compatibility problems between the various C implementations became apparent.

In 1983 the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee to establish a standard specification of C known as "ANSI C" . Over time, user communities of C,shared ideas and implementations of what is now called C standard libraries to provide that functionality.

Since the standardisation of the C library , applications written strictly within the bounds mentioned in the standard can vouch to be portable across different platform implementations.

There are lot of online resources which can act as a reference for the standard C libarary :
http://www-ccs.ucsd.edu/c/
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
http://www.freshsources.com/1995002A.HTM

Books on C :
http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/

If you would like to learn and understand the C libarary , you should grab yourself a copy of the The Standard C Library by P. J. Plauger . Dr. Plauger has impeccable qualifications for writing this book - he was secretary of the ANSI C committee.

Jargon File

Jargon Defination
Language used in a certain profession or by a particular group of people. Jargon is usually technical or abbreviated and difficult for people not in the profession to understand.

But it seems,within the software industry , the jargon's generation rate is far too higher to keep pace with it.People use Jargons to impress upon their peers/managers.Its better to learn , than to be left out or be embarresed to be asking someone for their meanings.I found one good link which provides a good vocabulary of computer jargons and might prove helpful in the long term.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html

Free E-Book resources

Around 38 percent of Indian Internet users (14 million) spent an average of 8 hours per week online ,as found in the last CNET survey . Due to the same reason,we see a proliferation of sites providing books in Electronic form (E-Book) .
I have used the below sites and feel they have a decent collection of books on varied subjects and might interest people from varied backgrounds ( though it might appeal more to people from computer science background ).

Some of the links are :
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://freecomputerbooks.com/
http://homepage.mac.com/kaotech/Free_Books.html
http://www.freetechbooks.com/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

There may be more and better sites . If anyone comes across , I would be happy if you too let me know about them.

Happy Reading

Open Source Education : Knowledge is there to be shared

The most practical thing to go open source according to me has been education.It started through the MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative , which plans to put all of its educational materials for its under-graduate and graduate level courses freely available on the net for anyone.

I think this provides an advantage to interested students/professionals to make most of the missed out opportunity of getting into a course at MIT.Many top universities seem to be following the MIT way and are providing their courses online.The world won't be divided now based on the quality of education with these initiatives.

Top 10 universities providing online courses
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_Courses_Online.php

MIT Open CourseWare
ocw.mit.edu

Stanford Open CourseWare
http://stanfordocw.org/

CMU Open Learning Initiative
http://www.cmu.edu/oli/

Also,to make it more convinient to search and find courses,this site would be handy :
http://ocwfinder.com/

Other helpful sites
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
http://www.opencourse.info/
http://education.jimmyr.com/
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/Online_Education_Free_201_2006.php

Tool Tips : Code search

Its always a good way to learn a language by reading good code written by expert programmers.Rather than searching the entire web for code snippets , we have some popular code search engines that give instant and relevent details .

Some of the admired code search tools are :

www.csourcesearch.net

http://www.google.com/codesearch

http://www.koders.com/

Tool Tips : Internet Encyclopedia

Welcome! The Internet Encyclopedia is my attempt to take the Internet tradition of open, free protocol specifications, merge it with a 1990s Web presentation, and produce a readable and useful reference to the technical operation of the Internet.

http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/index.htm

Tools Tips - Lightweight PDF reader

The Adobe Acrobat reader seems to be getting heavier day by day.For people like me , who just need the basic reader , I have found out a lightweight and cool PDF reader named foxit .

Its small in size , takes little time to launch and had a rich feature set . Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7 . You can download it and experience it for yourself :

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/

As for me , I am simply enjoying it , and have removed the bulky Acrobat components from my system.Even though the CPU power and memory requirements are increasing day by day , and software vendors are making most of it and indirectly forcing people to upgrade their systems , we have innovative products like these that makes the switch a lil too late ...