C Programming Langauge Course

C is often considered to be the mother of all languages because so many other languages have been based on it.

Though C is simple it is one of the most powerful languages ever created.  Considering it was created over 40 years ago, it is still used heavily and is usually in the top 5 or 10 most popular and most widespread programming languages in the world.

Learning C can actually make you better at programming in other languages like C++, Java, or C# by equipping you with a mental model of what the computer is actually doing when you run your programs.

By learning how things really work “under the hood”, and understanding memory space, CPU architecture, and so on, you can create more efficient programs, and obtain a huge advantage over other programmers in the process.

If you want to become a better developer, learning C is a great way to start!

• Background
• Sample program
• Components of a C program
• Data types
• Naming conventions for variables
• Printing and initializing variables
• Defining arrays

• Functions
• Invoking functions
• Elementary operators
• The operator= operators
• The conditional operator
• Increment and decrement operators

• Character i/o
• Handling end of file
• Simple i/o examples
• Redirecting standard I/O
• i/o with character arrays

• Function declarations
• Returning a value or not
• Function prototypes
• Arguments and parameters
• Organization of C source files
• An extended example
• Main function
• The gets function
• The strcmp function
• The check function
• The atom function
• The average function

• Defining the problem space
• Readability aids
• Bitwise operators
• Bitwise functions
• Circular shifts

• Fundamental concepts
• Aggregate operations
• String functions
• Higher Dimensional Arrays
• Array dimensions
• An array as an argument to a function
• Arrays of strings

• Fundamental concepts
• Describing a structure
• Creating structures
• Operations on structures
• Functions returning structures
• Passing structures to functions
• Pointers to structures
• Making sense of the p -> member notation
• Structures vs structure pointers
• Array of structures
• Functions returning a pointer to a structure

• typedef – New name for an existing type
• typedef with structures
• Header files for structure applications
• Bit fields
• Unions
• Non-homogeneous arrays
• Enumeration types

• System calls vs library calls
• Opening disk files
• Access modes
• Errors in opening files
• i/o library calls
• Example: copying a file
• Character input vs line input
• Motivation for the scan function
• scanf and variants
• print variants
• Closing files close

• if statement
• if else statement
• while loop
• for loop
• Endless loops
• do while loop
• break and continue statements
• switch statement
• else if

• #define
• Writing macros
• #include
• #ifdef
• #ifndef

• Compiling over several files
• Function scope
• File scope
• Program scope
• Local static
• resister and extern
• Object files
• Libraries
• The C loader
• Header files

• Fundamental concepts
• Pointer operators and operations
• Changing an argument with a function call
• Pointer arithmetic
• Traversing arrays with a pointer
• Traversing strings with a pointer
• String functions with pointers
• Relationship between array and pointer
• The pointer notation *p++

• Dynamic storage allocation – malloc
• Functions returning a pointer
• Initialization of pointers
• gets – A Function returning a pointer
• An array of character pointers
• Pointer to pointer
• Pointer to a function
• Uses of pointers to functions

• A database application
• the main function
• the menu function
• create_db function – write
• print_db function – fread
• fseek
• retrieve_db function
• flush and ftell

• strstr – Is one string a substring
• strchr, strrchr – Is a char in a string
• system – Execute a command line command
• strspn, strcspn – Verify string content
• Math functions