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

Chapter 8: Creating and Using Enumerations

The real world is complicated – far more complicated than just whole numbers, numbers with fractions, Boolean values, and characters. In order to model it, C provides various mechanisms for custom and complex data types. For the next eight chapters, we are going to explore various ways that our intrinsic data types can be extended and combined to more closely match the real world.

The first of these extensible data types is enumerated types. These are named values that are grouped because of some conceptual relationship we want to give them; we don't really care about their values – we differentiate each item in the group by its name. There is a value corresponding to each name, but usually, although not always, that value is irrelevant to us; the significance lies in its unique name within the group of enumerated items. However, a specific value for each item in the group can be specified by us otherwise it will be automatically...