Come and Git it.

I started reading the first few chapters of Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide and so far it's been super enlightening. There are a lot of things I don't understand about C that aren't really about C at all and are compiler or platform specific, like what's available to you in the pre-processor. The book has a great super clear explanation of how to use all those fancy #define and #ifdef bits work. That's the kind of stuff that I'm not abundantly familiar with that's preventing me from moving on beyond being a beginner C programmer to an intermediate C programmer. I had no idea you could set #define information in the GCC command line, either. Where do people learn this stuff? I feel super fortunate that I came across this book because I'd still be in the dark otherwise.

I thumbed through Programming in Objective-C and realized I can probably skip the first nine or so chapters since it covers basic C stuff like data types and control structures. The juicy bits are how classes are implemented.

Someone on Reddit posted a link to a site that has the full text (.pdf) of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. I didn't realize that it was legit released for free online. I just picked a chapter and page at random and had my mind blown. He's a really good writer.

This morning I made a GitHub account and did the quick tutorial on making a repository and pushing a file up. At this point I'm just following directions because I have no idea what any of the stuff I'm typing in does. I'm kind of irked because it has a great walk-through on creating a repository, making a new file, and commiting it, but it doesn't say what to do after you edit the file. I can't tell if the commands in the tutorial were only for new files or for any file. I don't plan on using Git or any source control for every quick program I write (unless I feel like I need the practice) but it will help make the case for trying to work on more long term projects.

EDIT: Also a good (free) read: C Elements of Style