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

Representing single characters

To specify a single character, use char. Typically, the signed char and unsigned char types are not used for single characters but to represent small integer values. C was developed in the time before Unicode and UTF-8. The character set they decided to use was ASCII. All of the necessary characters for printing control, device control, and printable characters and punctuation could be represented in 7 bits.

One reason ASCII was chosen was because of its somewhat logical ordering of uppercase and lowercase letters. An uppercase A and lowercase a are different by only 1 bit. This makes it relatively easy to convert from uppercase into lowercase and vice versa. There is an ASCII table provided for your reference in the Appendix; we also develop a program to print a complete ASCII table in Chapter 15, Working with Strings.

To summarize ASCII's organization, please refer to the following table:

As Unicode, and later...