Introduction to programming with C

Herman Kamper

Introduction

• Computers, programs and C
• Printing, variables and user input

Control structures: decisions and loops

• Breaking the flow: the if statement
• Our first loops: the while loop
• Putting it together: nested control structures
• More repetition: the for loop
• Logic and the do...while loop
• Completing the control structures

Functions

• Functions
• Building your own library (and generating random numbers)
• Enumeration constants (and a longer example)
• Variable scope and recursion

Arrays

• Introduction to arrays
• Strings, arrays and functions, searching arrays
• Binary search and sorting arrays
• Two-dimensional arrays

Pointers

• Introduction to pointers
• Pointers and functions: call-by-reference
• More pointers: least privilege and sizeof
• Arrays and pointers, and reserving memory on the fly
• Pointer recap, and arrays of pointers [video]

Structures

• Structures: defining your own types
• Arrays of structures

File processing

• Reading and writing text files
• Reading and writing binary files
• Reading and writing binary files out of order

Dynamic data structures

• Linked lists

AI disclosure and disclaimer

The summaries above were automatically created from transcripts of my in-person lectures. I used Whisper for speech recognition and Claude to automatically create the summaries. These were then lightly edited. But there are almost certainly mistakes. Please email me if you spot any glaring issues.

License

Herman Kamper, 2026
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0).