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

Declaring and initializing a string

There are several ways to declare and initialize a string. We will explore the various ways to both declare and initialize strings in this section.

String declarations

We can declare a string in several ways. The first way is to declare a character array with a specified size, as follows:

char aString[8];

This creates an array of 8 elements, capable of holding seven characters (don't forget the terminating NUL character).

The next way to declare a string is similar to the first method but instead, we don't specify the size of the array, as follows:

char anotherString[];

This method is not useful unless we initialize anotherString, which we will see in the next section. As you may recall from Chapter 14Understanding Arrays and Pointers, this declaration looks like a pointer in the form of an array declaration. In fact, without initialization, it is.

The last...