kevindong0

I'd be leery at best. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools

Could you expand upon how programming a microcontroller would help for non-embedded applications? I can't really think of any ways it would help aside from learning the bare minimum of control flow.

I mean, do you want to learn C the easy way or the hard way? The easy way is well, easier. But the hard way will teach you far more about the intricacies of C via trial by fire. The easy way is to install an IDE such as CLion. You'll find the in-line checking of syntax and basic logical errors to be very useful. The hard way is to use a plain text editor with some syntax highlighting and autoindent, but nothing else.

They really don't. I just wrapped up my sophomore year as a CS major and essentially all the CS majors I know get internships during the summer between their sophomore and junior year (including myself). Albeit, the summer between freshman and sophomore year is much more difficult to get an internship for. So, I'd suggest you try hard to get an internship for next summer. I don't know what exactly your program consists of, but at my university at least, the classes never, ever teach "practical" programming (i.e. programming for an actual job). They'll teach you a language or a concept. And they'll assign you projects to help you learn the language/concept, but they'll never tell you to make something actually useful/apply your newly found knowledge. That part of learning is entirely up to the student to do on their own. Since you know C/C++ and data structures/algorithms, you should know pretty much everything you need to know to make something that's of interest to you.

K&R C is the "classic" C book. That being said, I despised it when I first read (my first real programming class was in Java which I took my first semester of college; C and C++ were taken my second semester). I still dislike it. The reason why I dislike it is because the book is just outdated in its examples. The book presumes you know an older language (keep in mind that this book was last revised in the late 1980s) and tries to relate to those languages. The problem is that if you're learning C today, you almost certainly don't know those languages. I personally thought that reading the tutorials point guide on C to be far more useful in that they use plain English and practical examples that don't presume you have prior programming knowledge (in an obsolete language). In retrospect, I think the best approach is still to do the tutorials point tutorial, practice a lot, and then follow up with a light skimming of the K&R C book. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/ If you have a Mac, use that. If you have Windows, you _may_ be able to get away using WSL. However, I'd suggest you virtualize a Linux distro or dual boot it. I'd also suggest you use clang rather than gcc since, in my experience, clang produces far more useful error messages.