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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored various storage classes and how memory is allocated. In particular, we clarified automatic memory allocation, or fixed and named memory—the method we've been using exclusively in all chapters prior to this chapter. In addition to automatic memory allocation, we explored static memory allocation. With both of these approaches, we distinguished between internal memory allocation—variables declared within a compound statement or function parameters—and external memory allocation—variables declared outside of any function. For each of these storage classes (automatic internal, automatic external, static internal, and static external memory allocation), we considered the lifetime of the memory—when that memory is destroyed and no longer accessible.

We are now ready to explore in the next chapter a much more flexible storage class, dynamic memory, which is unnamed and can only be accessed via pointer variables...