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

An array with a terminator

A string is an array of characters with one special property. This special property is that the element after the last character of the C string must itself be a special character—theNULcharacter. NUL has a value of 0. This character indicates the end of the string.

To implement a string, we extend the concept of an array to be a specially formatted array of characters; an array with an extra terminating NUL character. The terminating character is sometimes called a sentinel. This is a character or condition that signals the end of a group of items. The NUL character will be used as a sentinel when we loop through string elements; the sentinel will indicate that we have encountered every element of the string. Because of this, we must be careful to ensure that each string ends with NUL.

Where we use 'x' (single quotes) to indicate a single character, we use "Hello" (double quotes) to indicate a string literal...