Learn C on the Mac (eBook)

Dave Mark is a longtime Mac developer and author who has written a number of books on Mac and iOS development, including Beginning iPhone 4 Development (Apress, 2010), More iPhone 3 Development (Apress, 2010), Learn C on the Mac (Apress, 2008), The Macintosh Programming Primer series (Addison-Wesley, 1992), and Ultimate Mac Programming (Wiley, 1995). Dave loves the water and spends as much time as possible on it, in it, or near it. He lives with his wife and three children in Virginia.

Contents at a Glance 5
Contents 6
About the Author 13
About theTechnical Reviewer 14
Acknowledgments 15
Preface 16
Welcome Aboard 17
Who Is This Book For? 17
The Lay of the Land 18
Go Get the Tools! 20
Create an ADC Account 20
Download the Tools 21
Installing the Tools 23
Take Your Tools for a Test Drive 25
Downloading the Book Projects 31
Let’s Move On 31
Programming Basics 32
Programming 32
The Programming Process 35
What’s Next? 39
C Basics: Functions 40
C Functions 40
Calling a Function 44
A Brief History of C 47
The Standard Library 48
Exploring Unix and Your Mac’s Built-In Manual 49
Same Program, Two Functions 51
Let’s Do That Again, Again, Again 58
Generating Some Errors 59
C Is Case Sensitive 62
What’s Next? 62
C Basics: Variables and Operators 64
An Introduction to Variables 65
Operators 71
Using Parentheses 75
Operator Precedence 76
Sample Programs 78
Sprucing Up Your Code 92
What’s Next? 97
Controlling Your Program’s Flow 99
Flow Control 99
Expressions 102
What’s Next? 132
Pointers and Parameters 134
What Is a Pointer? 134
Pointer Basics 137
Function Parameters 144
What Does All This Have to Do with Pointers? 150
Global Variables and Function Returns 153
More Sample Programs 159
Using the Debugger 166
What’s Next? 170
Variable Data Types 173
Data Types Beyond int 173
Working with Characters 184
Arrays 190
Danger, Will Robinson! 196
Text Strings 197
The #define Directive 206
What’s Next? 215
Designing Your Own Data Structures 218
Bundling Your Data 218
Model A: Three Arrays 219
Finishing Up With Model A 231
Model B: The Data Structure Approach 233
Passing a struct As a Parameter 237
Allocating Your Own Memory 242
Working with Linked Lists 246
What’s Next? 258
Working with Files 260
What Is a File? 261
Working with Files: File Basics 261
Working with Files: Writing Files 270
Working with Files: Fancier File Manipulation 283
What’s Next? 292
Advanced Topics 294
Typecasting 294
Unions 298
Function Recursion 301
Binary Trees 305
Function Pointers 312
Initializers 313
The Remaining Operators 316
Creating Your Own Types 319
Static Variables 321
More on Strings 323
What’s Next? 325
Where Do You Go from Here? 328
The Mac User Interface 329
One Last Bit of Code 331
Go Get ’Em 333
Answers to Exercises 334
Chapter 4 335
Chapter 5 338
Chapter 6 339
Chapter 7 340
Chapter 8 341
Chapter 9 343
Chapter 10 344
Chapter 11 345
Index 347