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

The conditional operator

This is also known as the ternary operator. This operator has three expressions—testExpression, ifTrueExpression, and ifFalseExpression. It looks like this:

testExpression ? ifTrueExpression : ifFalseExpression

In this expression, testExpression is evaluated. If the testExpression result is true, or nonzero, then ifTrueExpression is evaluated and its result becomes the expression result. If the testExpression result is false, or exactly zero, then ifFalseExpression is evaluated and its result becomes the expression result. Either ifTrueExpression is evaluated or ifFalseExpression is evaluated—never both.

This operator is useful in odd places, such as setting switches, building string values, and printing out various messages. In the following example, we'll use it to add pluralization to a word if it makes sense in the text string:

printf( "Length = %d meter%c\n" , len, len...