C, C++, and Makefiles
Microcontrollers are great and all, but if you're new to programming it can help to learn a bit about the software tools on their own before diving into the hardware as well. This repo has some example programs in C and C++, along with Makefiles that help you build them.
There are a lot of great tutorials out there, from this class and elsewhere.
This repo is meant to be more of a hands on reference. So clone it, build it, and play with it.
The Basics
C is a programming language. It was created in the early 70s at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This makes it quite old, as far as programming languages go, but it certainly wasn't the first (Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, and BASIC are all older, to name a few). And it's still widely used today -- number one, in fact, in some popularity rankings.
C++ is an extended version of C, created by Bjarne Stroustrup in the 80s. The syntax is basically the same, so usually any C program you write will also be a valid C++ program. The original difference is that C++ is object oriented (basically, allows you to associate data and methods with "classes"), but since then it's had all sorts of other stuff bolted on too (like templates, lambdas, etc.). C and C++ are commonly used together.
Unlike Python or JavaScript, C and C++ are compiled languages. This means that before you run your program, you always convert it into a binary format that your computer can execute directly. This is called building your program, and it is done by a compiler. To run code on your own computer, you'll almost certainly end up using gcc, clang, or MSVC. The first two are usually run from the command line, while the third is integrated into Visual Studio. We'll be using the UNIX style command line exclusively, so even if you run Windows, it's recommended that you install a command line toolchain.
Required Software
Overall, we'll need a compiler, and Make.
On Linux, if these tools aren't installed already, you can use your package manager. Most distros
have one package that has all the basic tools bundled together. On Ubuntu, for example, you can run
sudo apt install build-essential.
On Mac, if you've installed XCode, you already have clang. (You may need to tell XCode to install the command line tools specifically for it to show up on your path.) You can also use homebrew to install gcc. One gotcha is that Apple decided to alias clang as gcc in the stock install. So if you run gcc, you'll actually get clang. This is bad because not all the options are the same, so sometimes it just won't work to switch between the two. So if you do install gcc with homebrew, you'll want to run gcc-8 or gcc-9 (or whatever specific version you got).
On Windows... things are trickier. Most Windows applications assume you'll always use the graphical user interface (GUI) and not the command line. You could install the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This will work great for compiling C to run on your own computer, but it might lead you into trouble when programming microcontrollers (people often complain of USB errors in WSL). Before WSL, MinGW was the go-to command line environment. Overall you'll probably have a smoother experience if you bite the bullet and find/install Linux up front.