Book Image

Learn C Programming

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

C is a powerful general-purpose programming language that is excellent for beginners to learn. This book will introduce you to computer programming and software development using C. If you're an experienced developer, this book will help you to become familiar with the C programming language. This C programming book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in C. Throughout the book, you'll create and run programs that make use of one or more C concepts, such as program structure with functions, data types, and conditional statements. You'll also see how to use looping and iteration, arrays, pointers, and strings. As you make progress, you'll cover code documentation, testing and validation methods, basic input/output, and how to write complete programs in C. By the end of the book, you'll have developed basic programming skills in C, that you can apply to other programming languages and will develop a solid foundation for you to advance as a programmer.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
1
Section 1: C Fundamentals
10
Section 2: Complex Data Types
19
Section 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Section 4: Input and Output
28
Section 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Using a header file for custom types and the typedef specifiers

Because we have explored custom types (enums, structs, and the typedef specifiers), it is now appropriate to explore how to collect these custom types into our own header file and include them in our program.

We have seen the following statements:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

These are predefined header files that provide function prototypes—the typedef specifiers, enums, and structs—related to those function prototypes. When a header file is enclosed in < and >, the compiler looks in a predefined list of places for those files. It then opens them and inserts them into the source file just as if they had been copied and pasted into the source file.

We can now create our own header file, say card.h, and use it in our program. But where do we put it? We could find the location of the predefined header files and save ours there. That, however,...