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

Order of operations and grouping

When an expression contains two or more operators, it is essential to know which operation will be performed first, next, and so on. This is known as the order of evaluation. Not all operations are evaluated from left to right.

Consider 3 + 4 * 5. Does this evaluate to 353 + 4 = 7 * 5 = 35? Or does this evaluate to 234 * 5 = 20 + 3 = 23?

If, on the other hand, we explicitly group these operations in the manner desired, we remove all doubt. Either 3 + (4 * 5) or (3 + 4) * 5 is what we actually intend.

C has built-in precedence and associativity of operations that determine how and in what order operations are performed. Precedence determines which operations have a higher priority and are, therefore, performed before those with a lower priority. Associativity refers to how operators of the same precedence are evaluated – from left to right or from right to left.

The following table shows all the operators we have...