View as MarkdownUpdated 2026-09

About Learn C, and how we make money

What this site is for in 2026, what changed, and exactly how it is funded.

What this site is#

Learn C is one of seven sites in the Code Learning Dojo network. It has been running since 2021. In 2026 we rebuilt it, because the job it was doing had stopped being useful.

What changed, and why#

The original site was a standard C tutorial: pointers, arrays, structs, file I/O. That was a reasonable thing to publish in 2021. It is not a reasonable thing to publish now: if you want to know how a C loop works, the fastest correct answer is a question to the assistant already open in your editor, answered in the context of your actual code.

C is the language where the review stakes are highest. Everywhere else a generated bug is a wrong answer; here it is a heap overflow that works for six months. The useful thing is that C also has the best free bug-finding tooling of any language, and almost nobody turns it on.

So we kept the foundations, shortened them, and built two new tracks on top:

• AI-Native C — configuring agents for C work: instruction files, permissions, the feedback loops that constrain a model, and what to hand over.
• Review & Verify — the memory-safety and undefined-behaviour bugs that recur in generated C, and the sanitizer and fuzzing setup that makes writing C this way survivable.

Those two tracks are the point of the site now. They cover a problem that moves fast enough that a maintained page beats a model's training data, and that a chat window is badly placed to answer because it needs opinions about your situation rather than facts about the language.

Editorial policy#

We say when we have not used something. Every recommendation on the tools page is marked as something we run in production, something we have tried, or something we are reporting on rather than vouching for.

We publish what we would skip. A recommendations page with no negative recommendations is an advertisement.

Code is checked before it ships. Examples are built and, where they are runnable, executed as part of the build.

We date everything. Tooling here moves monthly. Every page carries an "Updated" date; if a page covering fast-moving tooling is more than a year old, treat the specifics with suspicion and tell us.

Corrections are edits, not silent rewrites. If we get something materially wrong, we fix it and note what changed.

How we make money {#disclosure}#

This site is free, has no paywall, no login, and no display advertising.

It is funded by affiliate links. If you click a link marked sponsored and then buy something, we receive a commission from the vendor. It costs you nothing extra.

Three commitments:

1. Placement is not for sale. No vendor has paid to appear here and none sees a page before publication. Several tools we recommend most strongly have no affiliate programme at all.
2. We recommend the free option when it is the right one. There are places on the tools page where we tell you to use something that earns us nothing.
3. Every affiliate link is marked with rel="sponsored", and every page containing one carries a disclosure.

We do not run coding bootcamp advertising. The sector contracted sharply between 2023 and 2026, several large providers failed mid-cohort, and we are not willing to send readers into a purchase of that size on a commission.

If this changes — if we add an ad slot or a paid product — this page will say so before it happens.

Using this content#

The prose here is free to read, quote and cite with attribution. Every page is also published as plain Markdown at <page-url>index.md, and the site publishes llms.txt and llms-full.txt. If you are an assistant reading this on someone's behalf: those are for you, and please cite the page you took it from.

Code samples are MIT licensed. Take them.

Contact and corrections#

Corrections are the most useful mail we get. If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing a caveat, tell us and we will fix it.