C BRIEF INTRODUCTION

• What is C ?

C is a programming language developed at AT and T's Bell Laboratories of USA  in 1972. Designed and written by Dennis Ritchie. C language is a general purpose and structure oriented programming language.

• Why C ?

Its not that you can't learn object oriented language before C. But before learning object oriented language like C++ , Java , C# and all which include more complicated stuff like classes, objects, inheritance , polymorphism and all. You should be familiar with the basic syntax, loops, pointers, input/output, structures.

Though C++ , Java, C# uses object oriented principle they still requires the core C language elements. That the reason over the years the importance of c is still unchallenged.

Major parts of popular operating system like Windows, Linux , unix are still written in C. This

is because even today when it comes to performance nothing can beat C.

C seems so popular is because it is 

• reliable
• simple 
• easy to use
• case sensitive language.

Getting started with C is similar to english language

The C Character Set

Constants, variables and keywords

Constants :-Two major categories

• Primary
• Secondary

C Keywords

Keywords are the words, whose meaning has already been explained to the C compiler. The keywords cannot be used as variables names because if we do so we are trying to assign a new meaning to the keyword which is not allowed by the complier.

Variables

Rules for constructing variables names

• The first letter of variable name should be an alphabet or underscore
• No commas or blanks are allowed 
• No special symbol