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

Common functions

If you carried out one of the experiments in the earlier sections of this chapter, you will have already encountered the strlen()function, which counts the number of characters (excluding the terminating nul character) in a given string. The following is a list of some useful functions and what they do:

  • Copy, append, and cut strings:
    • strcat(): Concatenates two strings. This appends a copy of one null-terminated string to the end of a target null-terminated string, then adds a terminating `\0' character. The target string must have sufficient space to hold theresult.
    • strcpy(): Copies one string to another (including the terminating `\0' character).
    • strtok(): Breaks a string into tokens or sub-strings.
  • Compare strings:
    • strcmp(): Compares two strings. Lexicographically compares two null-terminated strings.
  • Search characters in strings:
    • strchr(): Locates a character in a string. This finds the first...