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

Using header files for declarations and source files for definitions

The two types of files we will use to group functions are header files and source code files—or, more simply, just source files. Nearly all of the programs we have created thus far have been single-file source files that have included struct and enum definitions, typedef keywords, function prototypes, and functions. This is not typical in C programming; we have only been doing it to keep our programs rather more condensed. It is far more typical for C programs to consist of a main source file—where the main() function is defined—and one or more header files and auxiliary source files. The sortNames().c, nameList.h, and nameList.cprograms are very typical examples of a common C program.

Whenever the preprocessor sees the #include directive, which must be followed by a filename, it opens that file and reads it into the input stream for compilation at that location, just as...