Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed primarily at programmers that are interested in adding easily modified, hackable sections to otherwise standard C programs.

What you need to get started is a full working knowledge of C and some familiarity with Scheme or Lisp. While the programs and concepts used as examples may get pretty low-level and grungy on the C side of things, the Scheme scripts will generally be very basic.

While Guile is written in standards-compiant C, and thus could be used with any modern integrated development environment (IDE), like Microsoft Visual C++, this text is biased toward old-school programming tools throughout. Makefiles are used instead of the projects generated by IDEs. Tools that run on the commandline will be liberally referenced. So, the reader should be ready to deal with mighty command line.

Some of the information may be specific to the GNU programming tools, such as the Gnu C Compiler (GCC), the Gnu C Library (libc) and Gnu Make. All the programs will be run and tested on GCC. They may not compile on other platforms without some tweaking.