C Programming For Beginners

Comments posted online for C Programming – A Beginner’s Course:

“The text does a great job of explaining concepts and the examples are pretty good.”

“It covers a lot of ideas and concepts that are left out of the other beginner books.”

“This book does such a good job at explaining the fundamentals of the language…”

“This is a great book for anyone new to C programming”

“The clearest explanation of sorting and searching algorithms I’ve read. A gem, the best kept secret on the internet.”

“I was amazed at the number of sidenotes/comments in the chapters that I did not learn in college.”

This book is intended for anyone who is learning programming for the first time. The main goal is to teach fundamental programming principles using C, a popular language used in schools and industry. However, the book is more about teaching programming basics than it is about teaching C.

Basic programming proficiency requires that you know, at least, the following: the primitive data types of the language (integer, floating-point, character); how to write input/output statements; how to write conditional statements (if, if…else); how to write looping statements (while, for); how to write functions and how to declare and use arrays. But, more importantly, you need to be able to write programs to solve problems using these features. This book explains all of the above in an easy, conversational style.

To learn programming well you must write programs. The exercises are a very rich source of problems, a result of the author’s forty-odd years in the teaching of programming.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1 Elementary Programming Concepts
CHAPTER 2 C – The Basics
CHAPTER 3 Programs with Sequence Logic
CHAPTER 4 Programs with Selection Logic
CHAPTER 5 Programs with Repetition Logic
CHAPTER 6 Characters
CHAPTER 7 Functions
CHAPTER 8 Arrays
CHAPTER 9 Searching, Sorting and Merging
Appendix A – Keywords in C
Appendix B – ASCII Character Set
Appendix C – Representation of Integers
Appendix D – How to Get a C Compiler