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

String declarations

We can declare a string in several ways. The first way is to declare a character array with a specified size, as follows:

char aString[8];

This creates an array of 8 elements, capable of holding seven characters (don't forget the terminating NUL character).

The next way to declare a string is similar to the first method but instead, we don't specify the size of the array, as follows:

char anotherString[];

This method is not useful unless we initialize anotherString, which we will see in the next section. If you recall from Chapter 14, Understand Arrays and Pointers, this declaration looks like a pointer in the form of an array declaration. In fact, without initialization, it is.

The last way to declare a string is to declare a pointer to char, as follows:

char * pString;

Again, this method not useful until pString is either initialized or actually points a string literal or string array...