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

Using a structure with other structures

In card4.c from Chapter 10, Creating Custom Data Types with typedef, we saw a structure, Hand, that contains another structure, Card. However, in that program, we accessed the entire substructure. We assigned the hand.card substructure by copying an entire Card structure to it. While this is convenient if we are dealing with complete substructures, we also need to know how to access elements within the substructure of a structure.

Here, we are going to look at accessing substructure elements within a structure. Before we begin our exploration, copy the carddeck_1.c file (this is the carddeck_1c.c file in the repository) to carddeck_2.c. In carddeck_2.c, we'll add the Hand structure with substructures and operations on Hand.

Creating a structure consisting of other structures

We have already seen how to create a Hand structure that consists of the Card structures, as follows:

typedef struct  {
   int...