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

Understanding an array of structures

Before we begin with the next set of changes, make a copy of carddeck_0.c and rename it carddeck_1.c. In this section, we will make changes to carddeck_1.c.

Probably the simplest of the complex structures we will explore in this chapter is an array of structures. Recall that all the elements of an array are of a single type and size. Before, we created arrays of one intrinsic type or another; now, we will create an array of a single custom type, Card.

Creating an array of structures

In the carddeck_1.c program, we need to model a deck of cards. To do this, we will create an array of the Card structures, as follows:

Card deck[52];

With this statement, we have created an array of 52 cards.

Note how, in the preceding definition, 52 is a magic number; that is, it is a literal number that has a special meaning. However, there is no context associated with that number unless it is stated in the comments. One problem with magic numbers...