Beginning with C

Beginning with C is my introductory C textbook designed for any reader who wants to learn professional programming in C, and who has no previous programming experience. By `professional', I mean programming to a standard using acknowledged techniques, not merely being very clever and puzzling out some code.

It is very important when learning programming to do it right, so you don't have to `unlearn' bad ideas later. This book includes ideas such as abstract data types and design by contract, which are important in more advanced programming methods including object oriented programming, but it presents them in a simplified way so they don't present a barrier to beginning students.

The text has a large number of programming exercises at the end of each chapter, either for self-study work or for class assignments.

Most important, the entire book is C++ COMPATIBLE.

Some people think C++ is a superset of C, but this isn't true: many `older and badder' features of C won't compile under a C++ compiler, so if you aren't careful, going from C to C++ could be a problem. But in this book, every single program listing has been compiled under both C and C++ compilers. Students who want to go on to learn object-oriented programming using C++ won't have to unlearn a single thing if they first study C using Beginning with C.

Chapter topics:

1. Background and overview
2. Developing programs: calling functions
3. Data
4. Repetition
5. Input: obtaining data from outside the program
6. Making choices: the conditional statements if and switch
7. Writing functions with arguments and results
8. Top-down programming: choosing the program structure
9. Arrays
10. Text files
11. Structuring Data
12. Memory addresses: pointers
13. Advanced programming with pointers
14. Recursion
15. Data structures and abstract data types
16. Further issues concerning numeric computation
17. Random access and binary input-output
18. Scoping and linkage rules, storage duration, source file management, const parameters
19. Efficiency, searching and sorting

Appendices include

• Answers to selected exercises (leaving lots unanswered for lecturers to set as assignments)
• Additional C language features
• Descriptions of standard C library functions
• C syntax summary

All program listings and the selected answers to exercises are provided on disk. If you lose your copy of the disk, you can get it here.

Bibliographic Details

House, Ron
Beginning with C: an introduction to professional programming
PWS Publishing Company. 1994
ISBN: 0-534-94122-2

Australian Edition

House, Ron
Beginning with C: an introduction to professional programming
Thomas Nelson Australia. 1994
ISBN: 0-17-00821-9