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 Boolean true/false

A Boolean value is one that evaluates to true or false. On some systems, YES and yes are equivalent to true while NO and no are equivalent to false. For, instance, Is today Wednesday? evaluates to true only 1 out of 7 days. The other 6 days, it evaluates to false.

Before C99, there was no explicit type for Boolean. A value of any type that is 0 (exactly zero) is considered as also evaluating to a Boolean false. Any other value than exactly 0 (a bit pattern of only zeros) will evaluate to a Boolean value of true. Real numbers rarely, if ever, evaluate exactly to 0, especially after any kind of operation on them. These data types would therefore almost always evaluate to true and so would be poor choices as a Boolean substitute.

Since C99, a _Bool type has been available, which, when evaluated, will always evaluate to only 0 or 1. When we include the stdbool.h file, we are able to use the bool type as well; this is a bit cleaner than...