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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how a pointer is a variable that points to or references a value at a named location. To use a pointer, we have learned that we must know, either through definition or through casting, the type of the pointer's target, as well as the address of the target. Pointers should always be initialized to a named location or set to NULL. We have explored the relatively few operations on pointers: assignment, access (dereference), and comparison. We have also extended the idea of pointers to variables to include pointers to structures and their elements. We have also seen how we can use pointers to provide greater flexibility in passing and manipulating function parameters.

This chapter is essential to understanding the next chapter, Chapter 14, Understanding Arrays and Pointers, where we will extend our concepts of using pointers to arrays. We will see how to access and traverse arrays with pointers. Remember that an array is also a named...