My C Skills

"C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators."

C was first developed by Bell Laboratories in the 1970s with the goal of creating utilities for a new version of Unix. C is great for:

• Both high- and low-level programming
• Structured programming utilizing multiple functions
• Deliberate memory management
• Fast, efficient calculations
• Portability (can be used in many environments)

Most programmers will freely admit that C is not the simplest language to learn, but its ubiquity (used in the Microsoft Windows kernel, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and many more) and advantages make it a time-tested and enduring language.

I first learned C in a Computer Architecture class at Duke taught by Dr. Alvin Lebeck. The course focused on teaching how computers store and manipulate information to perform computation, but the course also taught and used C to demonstrate concepts of memory management.