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

Introducing dynamic memory

Do we always know exactly how many objects we will need to manipulate and allocate memory for in a program? The answer is a resounding no!

Not every situation or program can be efficiently addressed using just automatic or static memory. The number of objects may vary widely over the runtime of the program and from one run to another of the same program. The number of objects may depend on inputs from the user (covered in Chapter 20Getting Input from the Command Line, and Chapter 21Exploring Formatted Input), from one or more existing files (covered in Chapter 22 Working with Files, and Chapter 23Using File Input and File Output), another device, or even from a network connection to a remote server.

Furthermore, some problems cannot be easily solved with simple automatic or static memory. These types of problems include sorting algorithms, efficient searching and lookup of large amounts of...