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 arrays

We currently use an array of cards to represent a deck of cards. However, this representation is not sufficient for things we still need to do to a deck of cards. Two operations that are common to a deck of cards are first, to shuffle the deck into a random order, and second, to properly deal out cards from the randomized deck. We'll need to keep track of how many cards have been dealt and whether the deck is shuffled.

Our model for a deck of cards has just got a bit more complex. A single array representation is no longer sufficient. We will create a new structure, Deck, to hold additional information about our deck of cards as well as its shuffled or random state.

Before we begin defining this structure and operations on it, let's consider the randomization (shuffling) of our deck of cards. We could randomize our deck array by copying the structures in it from one index to another. However, since we now know about pointers, we can put...