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 Boolean true/false

A Boolean value is one that evaluates to true or false. On some systems, YES and yes are equivalent to true, while NO and no are equivalent to false. For instance, Is today Wednesday? evaluates to true only 1 out of 7 days. On the other 6 days, it evaluates to false.

Before C99, there was no explicit type for a Boolean. A value of any type that is 0 (exactly 0) is considered as also evaluating to a Boolean false. Any value other than exactly 0 (a bit pattern of only 0s) will evaluate to a Boolean value of true. Real numbers rarely, if ever, evaluate exactly to 0, especially after any kind of operation on them. Therefore, these data types would almost always evaluate to true and, hence, would be poor choices as a Boolean substitute.

Since C99, a _Bool type was added, which, when evaluated, will always evaluate to only 0 or 1. When we include the stdbool.h file, we are able to use the bool type as well; this is a bit cleaner than using the cumbersome...