C/C++ Programming Reference?

J

joe88ds

Hello everyone! I just recently started getting involved with programming for the first time with UNIX. I've been programming for a little while on Windows and am very spoiled with the MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library). Is there something like this for FreeBSD and UNIX in general? I've been searching and have not found anything I could possibly use. Where do I begin? Thank you for your time.
 
I read the handbook already. I'm looking for a reference, not a guide on how to program. Thank you both for your answers and time. I did however find something I can use, http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/CE.html. If anyone else has something like this then I would be very interested in using it.
 
You didn't mention what compiler you were using? If using LLVM/Clang I'd look into the documentation on their site, likewise if using GCC. I'd also look into the docs for libc and libc++ etc. You'll never find something quite as comprehensive as MSDN but all the info is out there. If you're doing graphical programming then you'll find documentation for that on the toolkits websites most likely, such as QT or GTK3 etc.
 
You might want to have a look at Richard W. Stevens books. "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, 3rd edition". He also wrote two volumes on "UNIX Network Programming". His books are excellent references and are now co-authored by Stephen Rago as Mr. Stephens passed away a few years ago.

John
 
Thank you everyone! This is very helpful. Those books look very promising and I will definitely consider buying one in the near future. I think for the time being the reference material that everyone so kindly helped me find will be enough for now. Thank you again for your time.
 
UNIX also has manpages.
For example, if I wanted to see how popen() works I would do

Code: 
$ man popen

This provides documentation on the parameters, return type etc...
 
joe88ds said:
Hello everyone! I just recently started getting involved with programming for the first time with UNIX. I've been programming for a little while on Windows and am very spoiled with the MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library). Is there something like this for FreeBSD and UNIX in general? I've been searching and have not found anything I could possibly use. Where do I begin? Thank you for your time.
Click to expand...

I use this for C++ :
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/
 
joe88ds said:
Hello everyone! I just recently started getting involved with programming for the first time with UNIX. I've been programming for a little while on Windows and am very spoiled with the MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library). Is there something like this for FreeBSD and UNIX in general? I've been searching and have not found anything I could possibly use. Where do I begin? Thank you for your time.
Click to expand...

Use the manual pages (man(1)) sections 2 and 3. For example:
man 2 send
man 3 pthread

Some stuff can be in other sections (e.g. a discussion about AF_UNIX sockets API would be unix(4), and tun(4) would be for the tunneling device API if you wanted to write a VPN client). If you're not sure, you can use the -k flag to search the manual pages. I personally like the manual pages better than MSDN. Also, if you're using the POSIX API, you can sometimes find documentation at http://www.opengroup.org/.
 
There's also the ultimate form of documentation available. It's written mainly in C and usually located in /usr/src. :)
 
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