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

Understanding infinite loops

So far, we have considered loops that have an actual end. In most cases, this is both intended and desirable. When loops never end, either unintentionally because we goofed up somewhere or intentionally, they are called an infinite loop. There are a few special cases where an infinite loop is actually intentional. The cases are as follows:

  • When the user interacts with the program until they choose to quit the program.
  • When there is input with no known end, as in networking, where data can come at any time.
  • Operating system event loop processing. This begins upon boot-up and waits (loops) for events to happen until the system is shut down.

When you start a program that accepts user input – keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and so on – it goes into an infinite loop to process each input. We would then need to use a break, goto, or return statement in the statement-body of our infinite loop to end it.

A simplified version...