In this chapter, we introduced many parts of the C programming language by comparing them to similar language constructs in Java, a language that many readers might know. C has similar language features to those of many other high-level imperative and object-oriented programming languages, including variables, loops, conditionals, functions, and I/O. Some key differences between the C and Java features we discussed include that C is a imperative and procedural language and Java is an object-oriented language, that C arrays and strings are a lower-level abstraction than Java’s array, ArrayList, List, and String classes, and that Java has an extensive class library of complex types whereas C is a smaller language with lower-level abstractions. The lower-level abstractions allow a C programmer more control over how their program accesses its memory and thus more control over their program’s efficiency.

In Chapter 2 we cover the C programming language in detail. We revisit in more depth the many language features presented in this chapter, and we introduce some new C language features, most notably C pointer variables and support for dynamic memory allocation.