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 switch()… statement revisited

The switch()… statement is ideally used when we have a single value that can be from a specified set of values only. Doesn't that sound like an enumerated type? It should and, happily, it does.

Using the switch statement to evaluate an enumerated type simplifies the intent of our code and helps to prevent some troublesome situations. Here is the shapeFunc() function revisited using theswitch()… statement:

enum_result_code shapeFunc( enum shape aShape)
{
...
switch( aShape )
{
case triangle:
...
break;
case rectangle:
...
break;
case circle:
...
break;
default:
... // Error: unhandled enumerated type. Clean up, alert user, return.
return unHandledEnumeration;
break;
}
...
return noError; // Normal end.
}

By using theswitch()…statement, it is clear we are considering only the value of shape. Recall that using if()…else...