C Language for Programmers

Description

This five day course builds upon the experience of the participant to make the transition into C. Examples in C are related to how they would be coded in other procedural languages. Unique features of C are introduced after the participant has become familiar with programming in the language.

The course offers a mix of lecture and hands-on exercises. It is a moderately-paced course that covers most of the features of the language. The series of workshops develop a simple program into a modular multi-function program.

Objectives

By the end of the course you will be better able to:

• Write programs in C similar to those in other languages
• Apply the unique features of C to create efficient programs
• Create modular and maintainable programs in C
• Use packages of functions to minimize the amount of programming
• Appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of C

Author

The author is Kenneth Pugh, a recognized C language expert. Mr. Pugh has many years of experience in programming in a variety of languages and operating systems. He is author of several books, including the course textbooks, C Language for Programmers and All on C. He was a columnist for the C User's Journal. and a member of ANSI C Language Standard Committee. He has been on the faculty for the University of Hawaii and Wellesley College.

Outline

• General Program Structure
  • Program Layout
  • Coding Conventions
  • Compiling and running a program
• Variables
  • Naming
  • Data types
  • Storage Classes
• Operators
  • Precedence and associativity
  • Data type conversions
• Control Flow
  • If statement
  • While and do-while loops
  • For loop
  • Switch statement
  • Break and continue
• Library and user-written functions
  • Function definition
  • Function call and argument passing
  • Standard library I/O functions
• Compound variables
  • Arrays and strings
  • Structures
  • Unions
• Pointer Variables
  • Definition and use
  • Pointer arithmetic
  • Structure and union pointers
• Preprocessor Language
  • Macro definitions
  • Conditional compilation
• File Input and Output
  • File Pointers
  • File access functions
• Designing with C
  • Modular coding and compiling
  • Using packages of functions
• Developing with C
  • Common Errors
  • Debugging Aids
  • Portability
  • ANSI C Standard

• Files and serialization