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 a structure with arrays

We currently use an array of cards to represent a deck of cards. However, this representation is not sufficient for things we still need to do to a deck of cards. Two operations that are common to a deck of cards are first to shuffle the deck into a random order, and second to properly deal out cards from the randomized deck. We'll need to keep track of how many cards have been dealt and whether the deck is shuffled.

Our model for a deck of cards has just got a bit more complex. A single array representation is no longer sufficient. We will create a new structure, Deck, to hold additional information about our deck of cards as well as its shuffled or random state.

Before we begin defining this structure and operations on it, let's consider the randomization (shuffling) of our deck of cards. We could randomize our deck array by copying the structures in it from one index to another. However, since we now know about pointers...