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 (38 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

Operations with pointers

At this point, the only operations that work reasonably with pointers are the following:

  • Assignment
  • Accessing pointer targets
  • Limited pointer arithmetic
  • The comparison of pointers

We will explore each of these in turn. As we do, we must also consider the NULL special pointer value (the zeroth address), or a null pointer, and the void* special, unspecified pointer type, or a void pointer type.

Assigning pointer values

We have just seen how to assign an address to a pointer variable by using another variable's named location, as follows:

int height;
int width;
int length
int* pDimension;
pDimension = &height;

A diagram of the memory layout for these declarations is given in the Accessing pointer targets section.

We can later reassign pDimension, as follows:

pDimension = &width;

This assigns the address of ...