cjilbert504 / C-is-for-Collin

Me learning C

C is for Collin

Me learning C

What I'm using to learn as of June 2023

I am reading the third edition of "C Programming - Absolute Beginners Guide" by Greg Perry and Dean Miller. I purchased this book used for around $11.

Changes / Workarounds / Notes from the book

So far everything in the book has worked for me. I'm on a 2019 Mac running Ventura 13.4 currently. The book suggests using an IDE called "Code::Blocks" to write and compile the C code. I didn't do this. I'm using my normal Vim setup and compiling my code with gcc. I don't remember how I figured out to do it exactly but pretty sure it was just from some Google-Fu. But to save you the trouble here is what I do:

gcc my-c-code-file.c -o name-of-resulting-executable

As a more practical example:
gcc hello-world.c -o hello-world

or:
gcc hello-world.c -o hey

In the ending program for Chapter 6 there is an error in the program, at least for me there was when I went to compile it. I thought it would blow up because the authors never showed that assigning a string to a variable was possible this way:

char Hero3 = "Batman";

Sure enough it is not. I fixed it in the following way:

char Hero3[] = "Batman";

Interesting Tidbits

• Apparently floating point numbers consume nearly twice as much memory as integers.
• Both 'X' and "X" have a length of one, however, because all strings get a null zero added to the end of them the "X" consumes two characters of memory. A bit of clarity here: 'X' is a character and "X" is a string.
• To assign a string to a variable you use a character array. You must reserve enough character array space to hold the longest string you will need to hold, plus the string terminator (null zero) 🤯.