Programming in C

This document is a "Programming in C" course or workshop manual, published in August 1985 by Digital Equipment Corporation's Educational Services. It is based on Thomas Plum's "Learning to Program in C" book and the "C PROGRAMMING WORKSHOP."

The manual outlines a comprehensive five-day curriculum for learning C programming. Key topics covered include:

• C Fundamentals: Introduction to the language, operands, operators, basic data types, constants, and declarations.
• Control Flow: Detailed coverage of if/else, switch, while, for, do-while loops, break, continue, and goto statements.
• Functions: Function definition, argument passing (including recursive functions), and various storage classes (automatic, static, external, register) with their scope rules.
• Preprocessor Directives: Use of #define for macros, #include for header files, and conditional compilation.
• Pointers and Arrays: Extensive sections on pointers, pointer arithmetic, single and multi-dimensional arrays, character strings, command-line arguments, and pointers to functions.
• Structured Data: Definitions and usage of structures (including members, nesting, and pointers to structures), unions, typedef, bit fields, and linked lists.
• C Standard Library: Comprehensive details on input/output operations (character, line, formatted, file I/O, and system-level I/O like creat, open, close, lseek), error handling (perror), and dynamic memory allocation (malloc, free).
• Programming Style and Debugging: Guidelines for writing effective C code and a list of common programming errors.

The document is structured with daily course outlines, corresponding text assignments, and practical programming exercises (labs), designed for a hands-on workshop environment within the context of systems like UNIX and VMS prevalent during that era.