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 pointers to structures

Before we finish with pointers, we need to expand the concept of a pointer pointing to a variable of an intrinsic type to that of a pointer pointing to a structure. We can then also expand typedef specifiers to structures to include typedef-defined pointers to structures.

Recall that a pointer points to the first byte of a target data type. We explored pointers to intrinsic types in Chapter 3, Working with Basic Data Types. Also, recall that a structure is a named location that holds a collection of named values.The structure as a whole is named, as are each of the member elements of that structure.

Once the structure type is defined, variables may be declared that are of that type. When a variable of any type is declared, the appropriate number of bytes are allocated in memory to store the values of that type. We can then access the member's structure elements directly via the structure variable's name and the . notation...