[fwlug] Brushing up on C

[Jon Bartels]

This is cross posted from the Geek list, just looking for some opinions
from anyone I can get in touch with.

I've been writing business applications in Ruby for about two years 
now and this week I've had to write some .NET code for a prototype 
application that records audio does some file operations and other 
things. While writing that I had to deal with managing a buffer for 
the first time since early college and I realized that even with a 
high level abstraction like .NET I had forgotten how to deal with some 
of the lower level concepts. 

I also work with a guy who used to work for Amiga as a video driver 
developer and he constantly gives me that "punk ass kid" look when I 
complain about having to "deal with this piddly low level crap". 

So long story short, any suggestions for relearning C? I know grabbing 
the Linux kernel source and poking around is going to run over my head 
and the garage sale C books from 1985 are going to bore me reviewing 
the basics of general programming. 

I'm thinking of rewriting some libraries I've written in Ruby as C 
then writing a Ruby wrapper for that. I figure that it'll force me to 
review some critical code, rewrite it in a faster language, and I have 
unit tests that will prove I did it right. Does that sound like a 
reasonable way to brush up on C?