Chris DeLuca

Finished reading The C Book

Finished reading: The C Book by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran, originally published by Addison Wesley. Took me 10 days.

I wanted to get a basic grasp of C, but most of the resources listed in the C language IRC channel were pretty pricey. One resource, however, was completely free: The C Book. That sounded both authoritative and cheap, so I started reading and taking postss.

It was only a few chapters in that I found out the book was out of date and only published for historical purposes.

I’m sure some of what I learned in my short stint with The C Book is still relevant, but I don’t want to risk polluting my head with wrong stuff.

Here then, are the postss I took.

1.1. The form of a C program

Each C library is first compiled, then all pieces are compiled together.

1.2. Functions

The main function is special, and is the first function that gets run “magically” in your program. This is only the case in hosted environments, however. In non-hosted environments, the first function called is implementation dependent.

#include <stdio.h>

/*
* Tell the compiler that we intend
* to use a function called show_message.
* It has no arguments and returns no value
* This is the "declaration".
*
*/

void show_message(void);
/*
* Another function, but this includes the body of
* the function. This is a "definition".
*/
main(){
     int count;

     count = 0;
     while(count < 10){
             show_message();
             count = count + 1;
     }

     return(0);
}

/*
* The body of the simple function.
* This is now a "definition".
*/
void show_message(void){
     printf("hello\n");
}

reading