Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

Introducing C

Compared to an assembly language, C is a highly efficient language in which to write operating systems. C is more maintainable, and programmers are able to update the operating system and produce accurate code.

caution

Notice that C's keywords all appear in lowercase, quite a change from Visual Basic. C is case sensitive, so if you use an uppercase letter anywhere inside a command, your program will not compile properly.

To achieve its efficiency, C has one drawback that other high-level languages don't: C is more cryptic than most other programming languages. Its cryptic nature comes in the form of a huge collection of operators and ...