C Programming Absolute Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition

25. Arrays and Pointers

In This Chapter

• Understanding that array names are pointers

• Getting down in the list

• Working with characters and pointers

• Being careful with string lengths

• Creating arrays of pointers

This chapter teaches how C’s array and pointer variables share a lot of principles. As a matter of fact, an array is a special kind of pointer. Because of their similarities, you can use pointer notation to get to array values, and you can use array notation to get to pointed-at values.

Perhaps the most important reason to learn how arrays and pointers overlap is for character string handling. By combining pointer notation (using the dereferencing operation) and array notation (using subscripts), you can store lists of character ...