C Language Complete Introduction

As most people know, C in terms of computer years is ANCIENT. I want to make it known however that this in no way affects what it is capable of doing, C is still just as useful and powerful as it was when it was first created.

How one language changed the world

C language Complete introduction

Prior to C, there really wasn't a great way of getting anything done, you typically just wrote assembly that would run directly on the chipset you were using. This meant that if you wanted to migrate a program to a machine running a different chipset, you would have to do a re-write (and we complain about having to change a couple lines of css for each browser?). Obviously this wasn't too great, but on top of that writing assembly is just...well, tedious. Prior to C, a language called B was being developed, and so C started as an iteration of B, and it was used to write a version of the UNIX operating system. C was developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs (Yep, AT&T;) with really one objective, and that was to lift you up one level from the underlying assembly so as to abstract the chipset specific assembly away from you so you could run a program on many different chipsets with realtively little work. This sparked a revolution in how people thought about computing and programming in general. It had such an immense impact on the world that we are still using things written in C, for example, most operating systems, games, browsers, databases, web services, a fair bit of API's and many more things are written in C. 

Why C?

C has one primary reason for being used:

 Speed

C is one of the fastest languages out there, given a program written in say C# or Java, and the same program written in C, C will usually outperform the Java/C# program by several times the efficiency, sometimes up to hundreds of times more. Obviously there are places where this speed is not needed, a business app for an accounting department isn't performance critical, it's data integrity is extremely important however, and so developers will often opt to use a language like C# that handles data fairly well for you when it comes to a business app. C also isn't really ideal for web sites, that's not to say you can't do it, it's just...well, you know what, go give it a try and you'll see what I mean. 

What would I ever use C for?

well...if i'm being honest? in a professional career you may never ever write a single line of c. This again is because of the nature of business, a corporation doesn't really care if their companies’ insurance claims application is running a little slow, as long as the data is preserved and it does the job. That doesn't mean you would never use it though, one thing C is really good for is writing small tools or libraries. As an example, I may want a thing that will organize my files in a specific way, rather than go through every single file directory and doing that myself, C is a great language to write a tool to do this for me. Other things it may be good for? Think about something that speed matters on, if you ever want to write a game, write it in C. I know popular belief nowadays is to write in JavaScript or HTML5 or Java or Unity, DONT, I won't go off on that tangent but...maybe I will add a section on here as to why you should write games with C. A web service is very perfomance critical, C would be good for this, I mean I could go on and on but frankly there's just a lot of stuff and I don't have the time to cover it all. 

C is hard though

I hear this WAY too often , some guy who writes html and css only told a person that C is a difficult language because...gulp...you have to manage your own memory -GASP-. Okay, let me break this down for everyone. C has less than 64 total key words, and it only has that many because of the C99 standard, prior to that it only had 32 keywords, and you can still write pre-C99 C code. compare that to something like C# that has 85 keywords for the language alone, that's not including the fact that you need to learn how to use Visual Studio, use each framework to do certain things, learn the .NET framework (which is MASSIVE), etc. That's not to say C doesn't have frameworks, but most aren't needed to do useful stuff, except maybe Win32 for Windows, and you can type C into a text editor and run it through a compiler without a whole IDE over your head (yes, C# can do this but it's not something you would ever do so to argue that would be pointless). The point is, aside from pointers, C is one of the easiest languages I've ever written in, if you covered just one keyword a day you would learn almost all of C in a mere 2 months (it will be much quicker than that, I promise.) So, sit back, relax, take a breather, and get excited my friends, because by the end of the first few lessons you'll see just how easy C really is! 

C will help you transition to any other language

We'll talk more on this, but C is a functional language, that means it does not use object orientation at all, this cuts down massively the amount of learning that goes into it. Another thing, most languages are written in...can you guess...? C! Therefore, almost all syntax can be directly linked back to C, so the way you write an if statement in C is identical to C++/Java/C#/JavaScript/etc. C has one truely unique attribute though that will be extremely valuable to you, and you probably don't even realize it yet, and that is the ability to see what your code is doing. More seasoned programmers may be thinking to themselves that other languages let you see what's going on and you're right...to some extent. In C however, you literally can see the exact assembly that is running, the data being stored in each memory register, how your memory is being allocated for each piece of data, how to OS does certain tasks, and the list goes on and on and on of what you can see in C that almost no other language can offer. This to me is the greatest value in learning C, if you understand in a deep way what is happening on your actual processor, not just what you think the Java Byte-Code MIGHT be doing, you are light years ahead of most programmers, and that is a fact. I sincerely hope that I am able to show you all the power of this amazing language, and I hope you too will be excited to write C code on your own.