Having a Nice Time with C programming

If you have read any of my previous articles, by now you should know that I am enrolled in the ALX-Holberton Software Engineering Program. It has been a mixed experience so far. First, I have been learning a lot and also, I have faced several challenges. Thank goodness for the peer-learning mode adopted by the program, I might have backed out.

The program is designed such that in the first trimester, we will work basically with the C language. There is so much the C language can do. The most exciting part of for me is how you can manipulate and interact with the hardware of your computer using the C language. So today, I learnt about Pointers and Arrays.

The best way you can see pointers is as special VARIABLES (actually they are Objects) that stores the memory address of another object (eg Variables). Any declared variable takes up a particular space in your computer's memory (RAM). These locations have their specific address. Therefore, a pointer stores this address for you. You might be wondering, what is the point of storing the address of a variable? The real power of pointers is that they can manipulate values stored at the memory address they point to. This phenomenon is called Dereferencing.

I also learnt about arrays in C. Prior to my enrollment in the SES, I had previous understanding of Arrays but what learning C has done is that it made me appreciate how the computer memory stores and delete these values for the user's use.

I do think every computer programmer should have basic understanding of C language because it helps you solve problems in more logical ways.