From the course: Code Clinic: C

What you should know - C Tutorial

From the course: Code Clinic: C

Start my 1-month free trial

What you should know

“

- The C language is the most ancient of the programming languages offered in the Code Clinic series, and there's a reason why it's still around, taught, and widely used today. C has staying power. My approach to the diverse set of Code Clinic problems is to remain faithful to C's history, and keep with text-mode, command-line programs. Of course, the versatility of C is that various libraries can expand its power. So I use them as well, but still, the solutions you see here are all text-mode for the most part. My compiler of choice is clang, the popular front-end of the LLVM compiler. Any compiler will do but being a traditionalist, I like clangs command line power and feedback. Clang is the native compiler on the Macintosh where I do a lot of work in the terminal window. You can obtain clang for various Linux distributions, under Windows you can use the Cygwin shell, though Windows 10 offers a Linux shell which would be my first choice. You could read more about clang at llvm.org, Cygwin is available free at cygwin.com, and as for Windows 10 you can obtain a free Linux distro through the Microsoft store app. I do my compiling at the Command prompt with code in a Vim editor window though please use your favorite text-editor, or if you prefer, use an IDE to compile and run the programs. For Windows I recommend the Code Blocks IDE coupled with the MinGW compiler. Visit codeblocks.org to obtain a copy. The code in this course also uses various C language libraries to boost C's power. You can obtain these libraries from your operating systems package manager or by searching for the online repositories, and yes it's always a struggle to get things working properly, so please have patience. This course relies upon some web services to complete the task. These services may change or expire in the future. If you attempt to run some of the sample programs and they don't work the same as shown in this course, the updates and changes to these services are most likely to blame. That's what you need to know. Now let's see how well the venerable C language does when it tackles some of the modern programing problems presented in Code Clinic.

Contents