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

We have explored the simplest way to provide input to our programs via the command line. We first specified how the main() function can receive arguments that contain the count and values of arguments given to the program. We saw how argc and argv are related, and how to access each argv string. A simple program to print out arguments given to it was provided for further experimentation. We noted how all arguments are passed into main() as strings. Once we access those arguments, we can perform further processing on them to alter the behavior of our program. Finally, a very simple command-line processor was provided to demonstrate the use of the getopt() C Standard Library function.

In the next chapter, we will explore a more comprehensive way to receive input from the user while a program is running. Just as printf() writes formatted data from program variables to the console (screen), the&...