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

This final chapter is the culmination of the various aspects of C programs we’ve developed throughout this book. We started by modifying and extending dealer.c to implement a simple but complete game of Blackjack. In doing so, we introduced various considerations when reusing pre-existing source code and using pre-existing libraries – source code intentionally built to be reused.

We finished by implementing a second game, very similar structurally to Blackjack, called One-Handed Solitaire. In this implementation, we not only built upon and extended dealer.c (via what we’d done with Blackjack); we also demonstrated how to incorporate some library code we unknowingly built earlier, a rudimentary linked list library. Note that when we employed this library, we also verified it with test code to exercise all of its functions. In this manner, we could rely on the library with confidence.

The development of both of these games provides a rather thorough...