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 (37 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

Chapter 18 – Using Dynamic 
Memory Allocation

  1. malloc() allocates requested memory on the heap, as does calloc(). However, calloc() initializes the allocated memory to zero before returning.
  2. The lifetime of memory allocated on the heap begins when the memory is allocated and ends either when free() deallocates that memory or when the program ends.
  3. A memory leak occurs when a block of memory is no longer referenced via its pointer and the block has not been deallocated. It is unretrievable until the program exits.
  4. There are several important reasons to create test code:
    1. You prove the validity and correctness of your code.
    2. As the code changes, you can verify that the code still works as intended.
    3. Confidence in modifying code that has tests is higher.
    4. Tested code tends to require much less reworking and debugging.