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

A quick introduction to Bstrlib

Bstrlib is a set of programs that is meant to completely replace the C standard library string handling functions. It provides the following groups of functions:

  • Core C files (one source file and header)
  • Base Unicode support, if needed (two source files and headers)
  • Extra utility functions (one source file and header)
  • A unit/regression test for Bstrlib (one source file)
  • A set of dummy functions to abort the use of unsafe C string functions (one source file and header)

To get the core functionality of Bstrlib, a program only needs to include one header file, bstrlib.h, and one source file, bstrlib.c, for compilation, along with the other program source files.

Unlike C strings, which are arrays of '\0'-terminated characters, bstring is a structure, defined as follows:

struct tagbstring {
int mlen; // lower bound of memory allocated for data.
int slen; // actual length of string
unsigned char* data...