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 3: Working with Basic Data Types

Everything in a computer is a sequence of binary digits. C's basic data types enable the compiler to tell the computer how to interpret binary sequences of data. Intrinsic data types are predefined and built into the language.

A binary sequence plus a data type results in a meaningful value. The data type not only leads to a meaningful value, but it also helps you determine what kind of operations on that value make sense. Operations involve manipulating values along with converting or casting a value from one data type into a related data type.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding bytes and chunks of data
  • Working with whole numbers
  • Representing numbers with fractions
  • Representing single characters
  • Understanding false (or zero) versus true (or anything not exactly zero)
  • Understanding how types are implemented on your computer with sizeof()
  • Discovering the minimum and maximum...