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 file streams

A stream is the means of transferring data, specifically bytes, between any device and a program. Streams are device-oriented. Devices, as we have seen, include a keyboard and screen. These are associated with the stdin and stdoutpredefined streams. A file is an abstract data storage device. Other devices include hard disks, Solid-State Drives (SSDs), printers, Compact Discs (CDs), Digital Video Discs (DVD), and magnetic tape devices.

For the movement of data—that is, a stream—to exist, there needs to be a connection from one device to the program to be opened for the data transfer to take place. When we run a C program, the connections to stdin, stdout, and stderr have already been made by the C runtime library for us. For any other kind of stream, we must explicitly make that connection and open a stream.

C supports two types of streams—a text stream and a binary stream. A text stream consists of lines of bytes,...