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 types and values

Every value in a computer program has an associated type. The type of a value can be inferred by how it is expressed in the program code and how it is coded. Alternatively, the type of a value can be explicitly determined by you, the programmer. A value in C always has a type. So, a value can have either an inferred or implicit type or it can have an explicit type.

There are also inferred types from literal values. A literal value is a sequence of digits in the program code whose value is implicitly determined by the compiler at compile time, which is when the program is compiled. The value of a literal can never change; it is baked into the program code.

When a value is given an explicit type, the compiler assigns a type to that value. A value of one type can also be converted into another type, either implicitly by how it is used or explicitly with typecasting.

So, we should always think of the value/type pair. The type...