This project will track C programming examples, projects and questions in the Sams Teach Yourself - C Programming. I will also provide summaries of each chapter and my own opinion on what could have been changed.
This is meant to review C programming in general and practice simple tasks.
The beginning of this chapter covers the basics of how a program in C is compiled and linked. It talks about IDEs and provides a list of ones that the reader can use and has the reader generate the standard "Hello, World!" program. I think this chapter could have touched on some important items. Like using gcc via the terminal to compile code. Maybe i'm partial being engineer and liking to understand how things work, but I believe the reader could have benefitied from how an IDE compiles and links code since most basically use a form of gcc/g++ no matter what OS environment is being used.
Chapter 2 walks through the components of a C program. It provides examples and then goes into a section by section overview of components like the main function, #include and #define directives, variables, function prototype, program statements, printf statement, scanf statement, return statement, function definition and comments. It provides some examples which I think are a little too advanced for very beginner programmers but intermediate / expert users would think they are simple. I think many programming books have this issue where they attempt to show an example of a program but they include functions that haven't been introduced and don't instruct the new programmer on the fact that they should go look up the function in an attempt to understand what it does. The books tend to make an assumption that users will just look at the program and accept that they don't understand some of the information, but I like to assume people who are learning programming are facinated by how things operate and want to understand them as soon as they are introduced.
Goes through the size of all variables types (int, float, char, etc..) and over constants (literal & symbolic). The information is good and having the example of sizeof being used in one of the examples gives the programmer an insight into the fact that you can check the size of a type. The only problem with the example is that is doesn't compile if you create it. The program requires %zu instead of %d which maybe depending on the IDE the author was using was able to handle this error but if you use gcc (on linux) then the comiple throws "expects argument of type 'int', but argument has type long unsigned int" or something very similar. The const.c program was actually the first program that I think fits in the section of the book it is in. It covers everything that the programmer has gone through in the book thus far.
This chapter is very important and covers alot. It goes over the rules for statements, expressions and operators and provides a precedence list at the end of all operators and their precedence level. (A good refresher for even for those who use it every day). My only issue with this chapter are the analysis sections after an example. Now I know this is setup for "beginners" but it seems very long winded when reading the summary and any seasoned programmer should skip these analysis sections completely.