C Playground

A personal learning repository documenting my journey through the C programming language, one small program at a time. Every solution here was written by hand while working through the fundamentals -- no copy-paste shortcuts, plenty of wolves.

Repository layout

01-basics/              One numbered folder per topic, in learning order
02-conditionals/        ...
03-loops/               ...next topics get the next number (04-..., ...)
notes/                  Reference notes (data types, cheat sheets)

Inside each topic folder, the top-level .c files are lessons and worked examples, and exercises/ holds the practice tasks solved by hand. Files follow a simple convention: a two-digit number reflecting learning order, followed by a short kebab-case description, e.g. 03-scanf-input.c. Compiled binaries are never committed.

Tools

AI coding assistants help draft lesson examples and review solutions, but all exercise code is written by hand.

Building and running

Each file is a standalone program. Compile any of them with:

clang -Wall -Wextra -fsanitize=address,undefined -fstack-protector-strong -O2 -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -o program 01-basics/01-hello-world.c
./program

To compile and run a single file in one step with those same flags, use the run.sh wrapper. It builds the file to a temporary binary, runs it, and removes the binary afterwards (any extra arguments are passed to the program):

./run.sh 01-basics/01-hello-world.c

All programs in this repository compile cleanly with -Wall -Wextra. To verify that promise for every file at once, run the check script from the repository root:

./check.sh

It compiles each .c file (discarding the binaries) and fails if any file produces an error or a warning.

Milestones

Reached

• First compiled and running C program
• Basic data types and printf format specifiers
• Reading user input with scanf
• Integer vs. float division and explicit casting
• First self-contained mini exam passed (howl average)
• Conditional statements (if, else, switch)

Ahead

• Loops (while, for, do-while)
• Functions: declarations, parameters, return values
• Arrays and strings
• Pointers and pointer arithmetic
• Structs and custom types
• Dynamic memory (malloc, free)
• File input and output
• A first multi-file project with a Makefile