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

Verify

At this point in the cycle, you may feel that just getting your program to compile without errors and running it without crashing your computer means you are done. However, you are not. You must verify that what you think your program was supposed to do is what it actually did do. Did your program solve the problem it was intended to? Is the result correct?

So, you have to return to writing your original program and then compare that to the output your program gives. If your intended result matches, your program is correct. You are done.

As we get further into writing more complex programs, we will see that a proper or good program exhibits each of the following qualities:

  • Correct: The program does what it's supposed to do.
  • Complete: The program does everything it's supposed to do.
  • Concise: The program does no more than it's supposed to do and it does so as efficiently as possible.
  • Clear: The program is easily understandable to those who use it and to those who must maintain it.

For most of this book, we will concern ourselves largely with correctness, completeness, and clarity. Currently, hello1.c is not complete, nor clear, and we will see why shortly.