Smaller C

Preface

In a world where new JavaScript frameworks come and go almost daily, why would you dive into an aging, bare-bones language like C? Well, for one, if you hope to keep up with all those framework fads (ouch, opinion alert), you might want a background in just such aging, bare-bones technologies that provide a foundation for so many “modern” languages. Did you look up popular programming languages on a site like TIOBE and find C consistently at the top? Maybe you’re interested in the amazingly advanced video cards and want to see how the software that drives them works. Or perhaps you’re exploring newer—and much smaller—gadgets like Arduinos and heard that C is the right tool for the job.

No matter the reason, it’s great to have you here. All of those reasons are valid ones, by the way. C is a foundational language and understanding its syntax and quirks will give you a very long-lived computer language literacy that will help you pick up new languages and styles more easily. C (and its cousin C++) are still widely used when writing low-level code for device drivers or operating systems. And the Internet of Things is breathing new life into microcontrollers with limited resources. C is a great fit for wringing the most of those tiny environments.

While I’ll be focusing on that last idea of writing clean, tight code for tiny, limited machines, I’ll still start with the basics of computer programming and cover a variety of rules and patterns that apply to C anywhere you might ...