Roadmap: Introduction to C Programming
The C programming language is heavily used in the scientific and high performance computing community, and also happens to be the same language in which many operating systems are written. Thus, it is important for scientists and engineers to have a good understanding of how the language can assist them with their computing needs. This document is provided for the beginning programmer who has an interest in learning to effectively use the C language. If you have never programmed before, you can also use this document to learn the basic concepts of programming. However, you may also want to refer to other references as well.
Objectives
After you complete this workshop, you should be able to:
- Describe the overall layout of a C program
- Name some of the main data types in C
- Explain the rules for naming variables
- Describe the different types of program flow (conditionals and loops)
- Create a C function and invoke it from other C code
- Use pointers to manage memory and manipulate addresses in C
- Explain how to create and structures in C
- Print output to the terminal, as well as read from and write to a file
Prerequisites
There are no formal prerequisites for learning C beyond basic computer operations.
Requirements
To perform the programming steps outlined in this module you will need:
- A computer with an Intel Core i5 or i7 Processor
- At least 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage (Hard drive or SSD)
- At least one monitor with full HD resolution, ideally 1920×1080
- Access to a C language compiler