So here I am, writing a program to process data because while the program itself has taken me a couple of weeks to write, the actual process of analyzing the data would have taken me a few months to do by hand. Not to mention the extreme repetitiveness that is data processing. I had an old old C program that did something similar and I was trying to update it to a mixture of C/C++/Objective-C. The whole process wasn't too bad, I just had a question about the most efficient design - so I fired off an email to Wil Shipley, the guy behind Delicious Library and within 5 minutes he wrote me back with a fairly comprehensive answer.
Unfortunately his comprehensive answer mentioned something that had been updated about the C programming language in 1999, hence the name C99. Having never heard of this really cool ability to resize "static" arrays, I grabbed my two C reference books and looked it up. No dice... Google found me numerous references to how to use these new resizable arrays but I was wondering why my programming books failed to mention it. Turns out, that my C/C++ reference book was published in 1995. It's the second edition, and I bought it my first year of college (which was 1999). Well it turns out the 4th edition of that same book is now on the market. That and my CS program at college used a really old compiler that didn't allow for C99 is why it was all new to me.
SO moral of the story, it's good to keep books updated.
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