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

Considering precision

When performing calculations with real numbers, we need to be concerned with the exponential difference between two of them. When one exponent is very large (positive) and the other very small (negative), we will likely produce either insignificant results or a NaN. This happens when the calculated result will either represent an insignificant change to the largest exponent value via addition and subtraction—therefore, precision will be lost—or be outside the possible range of values via multiplication and division—therefore, a NaN will result. Adding a very, very small value to a very, very large value may not give any significant change in the resulting value—again, precision in the result will be lost.

It is only when the exponents are relatively close, and the calculated result is within a reasonable range, that we can be sure of the accuracy of our result.

Granted that with 64-bit integer values and up to 128...