Book Image

Learn C Programming. - Second Edition

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming. - Second Edition

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

The foundation for many modern programming languages such as C++, C#, JavaScript, and Go, C is widely used as a system programming language as well as for embedded systems and high-performance computing. With this book, you'll be able to get up to speed with C in no time. The book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in the C programming language. Throughout the book, you’ll create and run programs that demonstrate essential C concepts, such as program structure with functions, control structures such as loops and conditional statements, and complex data structures. As you make progress, you’ll get to grips with in-code documentation, testing, and validation methods. This new edition expands upon the use of enumerations, arrays, and additional C features, and provides two working programs based on the code used in the book. What's more, this book uses the method of intentional failure, where you'll develop a working program and then purposely break it to see what happens, thereby learning how to recognize possible mistakes when they happen. By the end of this C programming book, you’ll have developed basic programming skills in C that can be easily applied to other programming languages and have gained a solid foundation for you to build on as a programmer.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
1
Part 1: C Fundamentals
10
Part 2: Complex Data Types
19
Part 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Part 4: Input and Output
28
Part 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Using functions that operate on arrays

An array is a collection of variables bound together by a common base name and an offset from that base. In nearly every respect, we can treat an individual element of an array just as we would any other variable. Even with function parameters, array elements can be passed into them as with regular variables, as follows:

#include <math.h>
int anArray[10] = {0};
anArray[3] = 5;
anArray[3] = pow( anArray[3] , 2 );

The fourth element of the array is assigned a value of 5. The function declared in math.h, pow(), is called with the value found in the fourth element of the array and is raised to the power of 2 (squared) and assigned back to the fourth element of the array, which now has a value of 25.

We could write a function that operations on anArray, as follows:

int find10Min( int anArray[10] );

This function prototype specifies that the function definition will only take arrays of size 10 and no other. This is perfectly...