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

Pointer arithmetic

Even though pointers are integers, only certain arithmetic operations are possible. Be aware that adding values to pointers is not quite the same as adding values to integers. So, adding 1 to an integer value gives us the next integer value—for example, 9 + 1 = 10. However, adding 1 to a pointer increases the pointer value by the value multiplied by the size of bytes of the pointer's target type. Using the preceding picture, adding 1 to pDimension actually adds 4 to the address of pDimension because 4 equals sizeof(int). So, if pDimension = 0x328d2720, then pDimension + 1 = 0x328d2724.

Pointer arithmetic actually only makes sense in the context of arrays. We will discuss pointer arithmetic in greater detail in Chapter 14, Understanding Arrays and Pointers.