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

Revisiting the hand structure

In carddeck_2.c, we used named member variables for cards in the Hand structure. This meant we needed a function to get a pointer to a specific card. While possible, that turned out to be cumbersome. Recall that when all variables are of an identical type and you have a collection of them, an array should immediately come to mind. So, we will rework the definition of our Hand structure to use an array of pointers to Card, as follows:

typedef struct {
Card* hand[ kCardsInHand ];
int cardsDealt;
} Hand;

We still have five cards, but they are now contained in an array, and we still have cardsDealt to keep track of how many cards are in our hand.

As you will see, this will simplify our Hand operations.