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 delimiters

Delimiters are characters used to separate smaller parts of the program from one another. These smaller parts are called tokens. A token is the smallest complete C language element. A token is either a single character or a sequence of characters predefined by the C language, such as int or return, or a sequence of characters/words defined by us, which we will learn about later. When a token is predefined by C, it cannot be used except in a prescribed way. These tokens are called keywords. Four keywords we have already encountered are include, int, main, and return. We will encounter many others throughout the course of this chapter.

Again, here is the Hello, world! program for reference:

#include<stdio.h>
int main() {
printf( "Hello, world!\n" );
return 0;
}

There are three types of delimiters that we will explore here:

  • Single delimiters: ; and <space>
  • Paired, symmetric delimiters...