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

Representing positive and negative whole numbers

When negative numbers are needed, that is, whole numbers smaller than 0, we specify them with the signed keyword. So, a signed integer would be specified as signed int. The natural use for signed integers is when we want to express a direction relative to zero, either larger or smaller. By default, and without any extra specifiers, integers are signed.

A signed integer uses one of the bits to indicate whether the remaining bits represent a positive or negative number. Typically, this is the most significant bit; the least significant bit is that which represents the value 1. As with positive whole numbers, a signed integer has the same number of values, but the range is shifted so that half of the values are below 0, or, algebraically speaking, to the left of 0. For instance, a single signed byte has 256 possible values but their range is -128 to 127. Remember to count 0 as one of the possible values. Hence the apparent...