{"id":20185,"date":"2023-01-27T01:58:51","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T01:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/in\/?post_type=product&p=20185"},"modified":"2023-02-07T08:41:31","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T08:41:31","slug":"learn-to-code-with-c-the-magpi-essentials","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/in\/learn-to-code-with-c-the-magpi-essentials\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn to Code With C – The MagPi Essentials"},"content":{"rendered":"

The C programming language<\/a> was invented in the early 1970s, and since then has become one of the most popular and widely used general purpose languages<\/a>. It\u2019s used by a wide range of programmers, from amateurs working on simple projects at home, to industry professionals who write in C for a living. It\u2019s been used to program everything from the tiny microcontrollers used in watches and toasters up to huge software systems – most of Linux<\/a> (and Raspbian itself) is written in it. It can give you control over the smallest details of how a processor operates, but is still simple to learn and read. This series is an introduction to programming in C for absolute beginners; you don\u2019t need any previous programming experience, and a Raspberry Pi<\/a> running Raspbian<\/a> is all you need to get started.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s so great about C?<\/h3>\n

C is a very powerful language \u2013 there\u2019s not much you can\u2019t use it for \u2013 but it\u2019s fairly simple. The language itself only has 20 or so keywords, but there\u2019s a huge library of additional functions that you can call in when you need them. In this series, we\u2019re going to concentrate on learning about the keywords, with a few of the more useful library functions thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n

Many of the languages that you may have seen, such as Python, are what are called interpreted languages. This means that the code you write is run directly: each line of code is read in and interpreted as you run it. C is different: it\u2019s a compiled language. This means that the code you write, known as the source code, is never run directly. The source code is passed through a program called a compiler, which converts it into a machine-readable version called an executable or a binary; you then run the resulting executable.<\/p>\n

This may seem complex, but it has a few big advantages. First, it means that you don\u2019t need to have a copy of C itself on every computer you want to run your program on; once compiled, the executable is stand-alone and self-contained. Second, the compilation process will find a lot of errors before you even run the program (but it won\u2019t usually find all of them). Most importantly, the compilation process means that the time-consuming translation of human-readable code into machine-readable instructions has already happened, which means that compiled code generally runs many times faster than interpreted code would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"