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

Chapter 17: Understanding Memory Allocation and Lifetime

Every instance of a value—be it a literal, an intrinsic data type, or a complex data type—exists in memory. Here, we will explore various ways in which memory is allocated. The different mechanisms for memory allocation are called storage classes. In this chapter, we will review the storage class we've been using thus far, that of automatic storage, as well as introducing the static storage class. We will also explore the lifetime of each storage class, as well as introduce the scope of a storage class—internal versus external storage.

After exploring automatic and static storage classes, this chapter paves the way for a special and extremely flexible storage class—that of dynamic memory allocation. Dynamic memory allocation is so powerful and flexible that it will be introduced and discussed in more depth in Chapter 18, Using Dynamic Memory Allocation, with the creation and manipulation of...