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

Understanding automatic versus dynamic storage classes

In all the preceding chapters, we have been using a fixed or named storage allocation. That is, whenever we declared a variable or a structure, we gave that memory location a data type and a name. This was fixed in position in our program's main routine and functions. Once that named memory was created, we could access it directly via its name, or indirectly with a pointer to that named location. In this chapter, we will specifically explore the fixed storage classes in greater detail.

Likewise, whenever we declare a literal value—say, 52 or 13—the compiler interprets these values and puts them directly into the code, fixing them in the place where they have been declared. The memory that they occupy is part of the program itself.

In contrast, dynamic storage allocation is unnamed; it can only be accessed via pointers. Dynamic memory allocation will be introduced and explored in the next...