Category: b. Good to know

C also happens to be demanding, fastidious, finicky and sometimes downright cryptic. You can easily write hard-to-read, difficult to maintain code in C. But, and this is a key point, you don’t have to. Learning to write maintainable code in C will require (and hopefully instill) coding discipline. In most languages fixing syntax errors can border on the trivial. For instance, Ada’s compiler error messages are so good it might as well have just fixed the code for you. Finding and correcting a missing or additional semicolon in C can sometimes be an epic undertaking. 

Reading is usually about the words on the page, but learning to program is about code. When you’re first learning to program, you should make sure to look at, and try to understand, every example. When I first learned to program, I would sometimes read the code examples before the text, and try to figure out what they did. It doesn’t always work, but it did force me to look at the example very carefully, and it often helped make the writeups clearer.

If you want to see what sample code looks like, you can read this site’s introductory programming tutorial. This tutorial spends a great deal of time talking about the sample code to help you work through exactly what the code does.

C will do precisely what you tell it, and instead of complaining when something doesn’t make sense it will still try to keep working. This can not only break your program but cause problems to your entire system!

While this sounds dramatic, it usually isn’t. You aren’t going to break your computer. You might end up with some weird bugs though. Take this example:

This piece of code prints questions to the console, before scanning what the user inputs and storing them as integers. The program is designed to add them together and subtract them before printing the answers back to the user.

You might already see that there is a problem here. The output certainly makes no sense!

Since we never actually subtract the values, the subtracted variable has a nonsense value given to it on initialization. Other programming languages might warn you that you never gave the subtracted variable a value. Not C.

This example is easy to debug visually, but some code is thousands of lines long and incredibly complex, and C won’t help you find what is wrong. Instead, C gives you a stupid answer and no way to find out why. Or is there?

Data comes in different types. It is important to know what type of data you are working with, as they can be easy to confuse. An example is knowing that the number 5 can be an integer (as in the number 5), as well as a character (the written character 5).

int number = 5;

Now there is no confusion, the variable number is assigned the integer value 5. C needs to be told what types to expect in order to work the way you want it to.

Data types and how they are assigned to variables is an essential part of your C course, and it’s important to understand.

Knowing how to give data the correct type is an important skill in all programming, but it is essential in C.

The final yet most important fact about C programming is debugging. As evident from one of the points mentioned above, C would not give any warnings about errors. You have to find them yourself. Therefore, you could use debuggers such as GDB for finding out any errors.

Debuggers break the code line by line and find out errors in the code accurately. Therefore, it is highly necessary to learn to debug among the other basics that you can associate with the C programming language.

The discussion presented above gives you an idea about C programming language and the reasons to learn it. The most important highlights of the discussion were the five basic things every programmer should know about C programming — operators, variable types, debugging, standard libraries, and the limitations of C in detecting errors in code.

Despite being a low-level programming language, C is equipped with standard libraries that can be used for developing programs. The standard libraries have definitions of different macros, variable types, mathematical operations, and location-specific data.

The programmer could use libraries by including them in the code. The most basic example of the standard library in C language is the “stdio.h”, which is the standard input/output header file. It helps in outputting to the console.

You can find 15 standard libraries in C programming language and detailed awareness of these libraries can adequately support your learning.

Another important fact about C programming which every learner should know is that it would not complain at all. Even if you make mistakes, C would not complain and continue its work. So, you have more chances of ending up with a lot of bugs.

You could try manual debugging for a few lines of code but not in the case of complex and incredibly lengthy codes. Other programming languages can prompt us in the case of any errors in the code. However, that feature isn’t in C. This is why it is essential to pay attention to developing each line of the code accurately.

Data is the lifeline of computing systems. It is classified into various types. The success of a programmer lies on his capability to set one data type apart from the other. Therefore, you should know about the basic data types used in C language in order to avoid any confusion at the later stages.

For example, the number 5 could be classified as an integer while the written character 5 could be a character. This implies that programmers have to learn the data types and ways of assigning them to variables as an important part of C programming.

If you are a beginner in programming languages and C is your first encounter, then you would know about operators, probably for the first time. Operators are defined as symbols in C which provide instructions to the compiler for executing a task. Each operator is associated with a predefined command. The most basic example of an operator in C programming is the “+”. For example, you can use the “+” operator as follows:

Total = principal + interest;

This code would add up the values assigned to ‘principal’ and ‘interest’. However, you would find different operators such as arithmetic, logical, and assignment operators. A clear understanding of each of the operators could help in learning the core programming concepts in C quickly.

So, why should you learn C programming?

For starters, you could find C almost anywhere in the computing landscape. Majority of computer operating systems are written using C. This is also found in the case of many smartphones and tablets. Microcontrollers are programmed using C and you could find them even on the display of your microwave’s door.

In addition, learning C is the foundation for learning other programming languages, such as C++, C# and Objective C as well as Python. This is because these languages were built directly on top of C.

Most important of all, expertise in C is a promising skill that can land up promising jobs for a programmer. You would also find learning C as a proven way to develop a better understanding of programming, the working of a computer, and the effect of code on systems.