The ** notation can really make a beginning C programmer blanch. In fact, a lot of Java programmers probably fled from the C language just after the initial lesson on pointers. They’d turn to stone even to glance at a variable like **blorf. You don’t need to cower under a desk with those people.
Continue reading →

Here’s a scary thing for most people: **blorf. No, not the name blorf, although it’s one of my favorite made-up words. What drives programmers insane — and all programmers, not just C programmers — are those double disaster asterisks.
Continue reading →

It’s all come to this: Gathering up the individual functions necessary to code a program that outputs the current month, formatted, with the proper number of days for February. Coincidentally, this post is published in February.
Continue reading →

Last week’s Lesson demonstrates a pretty decent calendar program. It works for every month of the year that has 31 days. Obviously that’s not every month, so more fine tuning must be done, especially to deal with the variable number of days in February.
Continue reading →

With an algorithm that properly returns the first day of the month, the next step in creating a calendar is to display that first week, and then all subsequent weeks. Sounds easy, right?
Continue reading →

To create a calendar, you start with the first day of the month. Knowing which weekday is the first of the month is vital to your success.
Continue reading →

Unix features a handy command line tool called cal. When typed by its lonesome, cal spits up a text calendar on the terminal window. Or you can follow cal with a month and year value to see a specific month, or just the year value to see a year’s calendar. It’s nifty!
Continue reading →

I can think of three rules for concocting your own string in the C language.
Continue reading →

Text stored on a computer consists of various displayable characters and perhaps some control codes, such as a tab (\t) or the newline (\n). The string has a starting point, but determining where and how the string ends differs depending on what is storing or reading the string.
Continue reading →