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 infinite loops

So far, we have considered loops that have an actual end. In most cases, this is both intended and desirable. When loops never end, either unintentionally because we goofed up somewhere or intentionally, they are called an infinite loop. There are a few special cases where an infinite loop is actually intentional. The cases are as follows:

  • When the user interacts with the program until the user chooses to quit the program
  • When there is input with no known end, as in networking where data can come at any time
  • Operating system event loop processing. This begins upon boot-up and waits (loops) for events to happen until the system is shut down.

When you start a program that accepts user input—keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and so on, it goes into an infinite loop to process each input. We would then need to use a break, goto, or return statement in the statement-body of our infinite loop...