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 multi-file programs

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the differences between source files and header files, we first need to understand why we need to have multiple source files at all.

In Chapter 23, Using File Input and File Output, we saw how some of the functions in that program pertained only to opening and closing files, and some of the functions pertained only to manipulating a linked list. We used the sortNames.c file to define the usage(), getName(), putName(), trimStr(), and, of course, main() functions. Each of these functions deals with some detail of input and output. Although you could argue that trimStr() belongs more logically in a string-handling source code file, we use it here to clean up the string from getName(), so here it stays. To sort the names, we used functions declared in nameList.h and defined in nameList.c. These functions dealt only with the linked list structure. Since these functions were called from the main() functions...