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 the previous chapter, we created a program where every structure and every function in each source file was available to every other source file. Such accessibility is not always desirable, especially in very large programs with many source files.

In this chapter, we learned about the three components of scope: visibility, extent, and linkage. For variables, we applied those concepts to various levels of scope: block/local, function parameters, file, and global scope. We then learned how these concepts applied to the five storage classes: autoregisterexternstatic, and typedef

We saw how functions have simpler scoping rules than variables. We saw how header files allow functions to be global across multiple files, wherever the header is included. We then applied the static keyword to functions to limit their scope to just a single compilation unit.

In the next chapter, we will see how to simplify the process of compiling...