Schedule and resources for 2008:

All materials required for laboratory sessions may be found in the local directory /cslinux/examples/CITS1210/.
Additional materials will be added here as the unit progresses.

Week 1	Lecture-1, Thursday 31st July An introduction the ISO-C99 programming language, motivating the need to follow programming language standards, recognition that C is a general purpose, but not perfect language, and an introduction the gcc C compiler. Textbook: sections 1.3-1.4	No labsheet or tutorial this week
Week 2	Lecture-2, Thursday 7th August The structure of C programs, the naming of variables, basic datatypes, flow of control in a C programs, conditional execution, and bounded and unbounded loops. Textbook: sections 2.1-2.6, 5.1-5.3, 6.1-6.7	Labsheet-1 and some sample solutions.
Week 3	Lecture-3, Thursday 14th August An introduction to functions, the datatype and return value of a function, function parameters and passing arguments, 1-dimensional arrays (vectors), how arrays may be initialized, and how C uses character arrays to support character strings. Textbook: sections 4.1-4.6, 8.1-8.4, 11.1-11.2	Labsheet-2 and some sample solutions. Tutorial-1
Week 4	Lecture-4, Thursday 21st August (handout) In which we use the wordsquare puzzle to introduce a number of new concepts, including: opening and closing text files, reading a text file line-by-line, and writing short functions to modify and check the characteristics of strings passed as arguments. Textbook: sections 7.1-7.3, 11.3-11.5	Labsheet-3 and some sample solutions. Tutorial-2
Week 5	Lecture-5, Thursday 28th August New uses for the C preprocessor, pre- and post- incrementing and decrementing, shorthand arithmetic, writing output to files and to character strings, the importance of a program's exit status, and the role of static variables. Textbook: sections G.1-G.3, 3.3, 7.4 Extra material on enumerated types and structures - see Lecture 06.	Labsheet-4 Tutorial-3
Week 6	Lecture-6, Thursday 4th September (handout) In which we use a considerably simplified version of chess to introduce the new concepts of using enumerated types to represent sequences of distinct values, structures to hold collections of strongly related data, 2-dimensional arrays, and user-defined types to name and represent our data our way. Textbook: sections 8.7-8.8, 12.1-12.3	Tutorial-4 1st project, contributing 15%, handed out Thursday 28th Aug, due 12noon Friday 12th September.   No tutorial in week 7.
Week 7	Lecture-7, Thursday 11th September The detailed role of gcc in compilation and linking, the development of a small project in multiple files, the difference between declarations and definitions, the use of make to compile projects involving multiple files, and the construction of our own libraries. Make documentation: sections 1-2, 6.1-6.6; Textbook: sections K.1-K.2
Non-teaching week
Week 8	Lecture-8, Thursday 25th September Mid-semester test In the following 1-hour lecture we undertake a slow introduction to pointers, the "address-of" operator, pointer dereferencing, the relationship between arrays and pointers, pointer arithmetic, functions with pointer parameters, and functions returning pointer values. Textbook: sections 10.1-10.3	No labsheet or tutorial this week
Week 9	Lecture-9, Thursday 2nd October Passing pointers to functions, allocating new memory for basic data types, arrays, and user-defined types, deallocating dynamic memory no longer required, and sorting arrays of any type using the function qsort. Textbook: sections 10.4-10.5	Labsheet-5 and some sample solutions.
Week 10	Lecture-10, Thursday 9th October Processing standard command-line arguments and command switches, the getopt functions, how to report operating system-specific errors consistently, and how to read the contents of a directory and to investigate directory contents. Textbook: sections H.1-H.2	Labsheet-6 Tutorial-5
Week 11	Lecture-11, Thursday 16th October The motivation for dynamic data structures, characterized dynamic data structures, three simple structures - stacks, lists, and queues, and code for basic operations on them - their allocation and initialization, adding items to them, their traversal, removing items from them, and deallocating their items and the whole structure. Textbook: sections 15.1-15.4	Tutorial-6 2nd project, contributing 25%, handed out Thursday 9th October, due 12noon Friday 31st October.  Tutorial-7   Review tutorial in week-13
Week 12	Lecture-12, Thursday 23rd October How integer data is stored and represented, the bitwise operators of C99, how to store multiple items in integers and how to extract them, and how to read and write files of binary data. Textbook: sections D.1-D.2, 13.1-13.3, 14.1-14.4
Week 13	No lecture

Some online tutorials and reference documents on C

• C Programming Notes, by Steve Summit (Experimental College, University of Washington)
  • Introductory C Programming, chapters 1-14.
  • Intermediate C Programming, chapters 15-25.
• The C Standard Library.
• A Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C, by Ted Jensen.
• The Wikipedia entry for the C programming language.
• The USENET discussion Why is C good???.

• The Development of the C Language, an historical reflection, by Dennis M Richie.
• WG14 N1124 (PDF, 550 pages)
  The lastest publically available version of the standard is the combined C99+Technical Corrigendums 1 & 2, dated 2005-05-06. This is a WG14 working paper, but it reflects the consolidated standard at the time of issue.
• C99RationaleV5.10 (PDF, 224 pages)
  The rationale for the C99 standard.

Moving from Java to C?

• Learning C from Java, is about 20 pages, and may be enough for many students.
• C for Java Programmers course, is much longer and is quite comprehensive (postscript notes and PDF slides).

   

• A simplified chronology of selected programming languages.

Editing C and text files with vi/vim

Which editor you choose is up to you, however, we recommend the use of the vi editor (or its cousin vim or its more graphical cousin gvim) - a general purpose editor used by a large proportion of the Unix community.

However (as is the case with most Unix-based editors), you will need to learn a number of keyboard-based commands to interact with the editor. Again, mastery takes time and practice - don't be afraid to try things!

Some vi tutorials you may find useful include:

• Vimdoc: The Online Source For Vim Documentation (select the link "Vim User Manual -> HTML Format")
• A vi quick reference sheet
• What Is Vim (It's Easier than You Think)
• Using the Vi Editor
• The Vi Lovers Home Page