Introduction to Programming

Computers and computer programming. History of computing. Structure of the computer. Information in the computer. Software and programming languages. Requirements for a procedural programming language. Executable programs. Compilation and linking. The C programming language. The C programming environments. The gcc compiler. Elementary C programs. Strength and features of C. Variables, constants, types and declarations. Assignment statement, operators and expressions. Flow of control. Program structure, functions and global variables. Scope and lifetime of variables. Recursion. Memory addresses, pointers and arrays. Dynamic memory allocation. Strings. Arrays of pointers, pointers to pointers and multidimensional arrays. Pointers to functions. Command line arguments. Enumerations, structures, self-referential structures (linked lists, binary trees), unions, bit fields and typedefs. Input-output functions. File handling. The C preprocessor. Preprocessor macros. Sorting and searching. C programming guidelines. Common errors in C programming.