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 brute-force repetition

In brute-force repetition, a statement or series of statements to be repeated is simply copied over and over the required number of times. This is the most restrictive form of repetition because the number of repeats is hardcoded in and can't be changed at runtime.

There are several other downsides to this type of repetition. First, what if you had to change one or more of the statements that have been copied over and over? Tedious would be the word to describe the work required to either change all of them (error-prone) or to delete, correct, and recopy the lines (also error-prone). Another downside is that it makes the code unnecessarily bulky. Copying 10 lines is one thing, but 100 or 1,000 is another thing altogether.

However, there are also times when copying a single statement multiple times is actually necessary. The situation where this occurs is in an advanced topic involving loop unrolling, which we will not...