C Programming

Course Description

In this five-day hands-on course students learn how to write, enhance, debug, and maintain C programs. Students learn how to write major numerical, text-processing, interactive, and database programs in C.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Write and debug interactive C programs.
• Use the variety of data types appropriate to specific programming problems.
• Utilize the modular features of C.
• Write efficient and easy-to-read C programs.
• Demonstrate the use of the various control flow constructs.
• Use pointers and arrays to efficiently solve software problems.
• Create their own data types.
• Use functions from the portable C library.
• Read and write data to and from files.
• Write C programs to perform complex mathematical calculations.

Course Benefits

Linux is written in C. Many other important computer programs are written in C. In this course, students learn how to program in C. By learning how to program in C students will be able to write, support, and enhance many important computer programs written in C.

Who Should Attend

This course is valuable for anyone who has been tasked with revising, building, managing, supporting, or maintaining a C programming project, and anyone who needs to learn C.

Prerequisite

To ensure your success, we recommend you first take either our Introduction To UNIX course or our Introduction To Linux course, or have the equivalent knowledge. Familiarity with a text editor, and basic UNIX/Linux command line interface is assumed.

Method Of Instruction

Lecture, demonstrations, questions and answers, and numerous hands-on exercises.

Hands-on Exercises

Throughout this course, students perform a numerous hands-on exercises, including:

• Simple print statement
• Simple and complex for loops
• Simple and complex while loops
• Character counting
• Line counting
• Word counting
• Complex if-else
• Sorting
• Programs with arguments
• Formatting output
• Calling system functions
• Interactive programs that check for user input error
• Bernoulli trial
• Data type conversion
• Temperature conversion
• Solving simple geometry and engineering problems using functions
• Character manipulation
• Concatenate strings
• Reading and writing to files
• Solving mathematical equations
• Using switch and case
• Using pointer and arrays
• Using external variables
• Recursive function call
• Finding patterns in strings
• Using arrays to manipulate text
• Using pointers to address memory
• Using pointers to manipulate arrays
• Using pointers and structures
• Using unions and typedef
• Using arrays to perform matrix arithmetic

Course Outline

Chapter 1: Introduction to C Programming

• Variables and Arithmetic
• The For Statement
• Symbolic Constants
• Arrays
• Functions
• Arguments
• Character Arrays
• External Variables

Chapter 2: Types, Operators and Expressions

• Variable Names
• Data Types and Sizes
• Constants
• Declarations
• Arithmetic Operators
• Relational and Logical Operators
• Type Conversions
• Increment and Decrement Operators
• Bitwise Logical Operators
• Assignment Operators and Expressions
• Conditional Expressions
• Precedence and Order of Evaluation

Chapter 3: Control Flow

• Statements and Blocks
• If-Else
• Switch
• Loops
• Break
• Continue
• Labels

Chapter 4: Functions and Program Structure

• Function Arguments
• Functions Returning Non-Integers
• External Variables
• Scope Rules
• Static Variables
• Register Variables
• Block Structure
• Initialization
• Recursion
• The C Preprocessor

Chapter 5: Pointers and Arrays

• Pointers and Addresses
• Pointers and Function Arguments
• Pointers and Arrays
• Address Arithmetic
• Character Pointers and Functions
• Pointers are not Integers
• Multi-Dimensional Arrays
• Pointer Arrays
• Pointers to Pointers
• Initialization of Pointer Arrays
• Command-line Arguments

Chapter 6: Structures

• Structures and Functions
• Arrays of Structures
• Pointers to Structures
• Self-referential Structures
• Tables
• Fields
• Unions
• Typedef

Chapter 7: Input and Output

• Access to the Standard Library
• getchar and putchar
• printf
• scanf and sscanf
• In-memory Format Conversion
• File Access
• Error Handling
• Line Input and Output
• Additional Functions

Chapter 8: System Interface

• File Descriptors
• Read and Write
• Open and Close
• Linking