Learning C programming language in 24 hours

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C is a programming language. The C language was first developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs.
Ritchie called his newly developed language C simply because there was a B programming language already. (As a
matter of fact, the B language led to the development of C.)
C is a high-level programming language. In fact, C is one of the most popular general-purpose programming
languages.
In the computer world, the further a programming language is from the computer architecture, the higher the
language's level. You can imagine that the lowest-level languages are machine languages that computers understand
directly. The high-level programming languages, on the other hand, are closer to our human languages.
High-level programming languages, including C, have the following advantages:

• Readability: Programs are easy to read.
  Maintainability: Programs are easy to maintain.
  Portability: Programs are easy to port across different computer platforms.

The C language's readability and maintainability benefit directly from its relative closeness to human languages,
especially English.
Each high-level language needs a compiler or an interpreter to translate instructions written in the high-level
programming language into a machine language that a computer can understand and execute. Different machines may
need different compilers or interpreters for the same programming language. For instance, I use Microsoft's C
compiler to compile the C programs in this book for my personal computer (PC). If I need to run the C programs on a
UNIX-based workstation, I have to use another type of C compiler to compile these programs. Therefore, the
portability of programs written in C is realized by re-compiling the programs with different compilers for different
machines.