07 — Cheat Sheets and References¶

These four tabs stay open in your browser for the next 13 months. They are the daily-driver references — not tutorials, not blogs, but the pages you Cmd-F while writing code at 11 PM. Bookmark all four; memorize the URL of at least two.

The four you keep open¶

Reference	What it is	URL	When to use
cppreference.com — C section	The community-maintained standards reference for C89 → C23	https://en.cppreference.com/w/c	Any question about “what does `strncpy` actually do?” or “is this well-defined?” Prefer over cplusplus.com (which is dated and error-prone).
man7.org Linux man pages	Michael Kerrisk’s canonical Linux man page archive	https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/	Every syscall, every glibc function. `man 2 read`, `man 3 printf`, `man 7 signal`. Author is also the Linux Programming Interface author.
cdecl.org	Translates C declarations to English and back	https://cdecl.org/	The moment you see `void ((f[])())()` and panic. Also learn the mnemonic in Expert C Programming ch. 3.
Compiler Explorer (godbolt.org)	Live x86/ARM/RISC-V assembly for your C, across gcc/clang/msvc versions	https://godbolt.org/	Every time you want to know “does the compiler optimize this?” Set filter to `Directives: off`, `Comments: off`, `Demangle: on`.

Second-tier references (bookmark but don’t obsess)¶

Reference	URL	Use case
POSIX.1-2024 online	https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/	The actual POSIX standard, free HTML.
glibc manual	https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/	When man pages disagree with cppreference.
Linux kernel docs	https://docs.kernel.org/	Kernel-side reference from M10 onward.
Intel Intrinsics Guide	https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guide/	When you start writing SIMD in M11.
ARM NEON Intrinsics Reference	https://developer.arm.com/architectures/instruction-sets/intrinsics/	Apple Silicon SIMD.
N3096 / draft C23 standard	https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3096.pdf	Read the actual words in the standard when arguments break out.

Cheat sheets worth printing¶

printf conversion specifiers — one card, taped near your monitor. cppreference has a clean table.
gdb command reference — https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/ · print one page of the top 30 commands.
Makefile special variables ($@, $<, $^, $*) — GNU make manual, print p. 1 of chapter “Automatic Variables.”

What most people get wrong about references¶

They Google → Stack Overflow → copy-paste. cppreference is faster and correct. In 2026 SO’s C answers are increasingly polluted with LLM-generated code that compiles but is subtly wrong. Train the habit: cppreference first, man page second, SO only for “how do people typically…” phrasing questions.

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