Josh Wieder

Stanford created a strange, claymation character named Binky to teach students about the concept of Pointers in programming. Watch the video and share in the severe WTF-ness that comes along with it.

In its simplest sense Typecasting is altering a computer's interpretation of data by implicitly or explicitly changing its data type; for example, by changing an `int` to a `float` and vice verse. To better understand typecasting, we must start with data types themselves. In programming languages like C, every variable has some kind of `type` that determines how the computer and the user interprets that variable. Each of these data types, for instance `int`, `long long`, `float` and `double` all have their own unique characteristics and are use to handle data types of various ranges and precision. Typecasting allows us to take a floating point number, like 3.14, and specifying the number before the decimal - 3 - by parsing it to an `int`. Let's us an example from the English language to better clarify what we mean. example.         WIND Each carefully manipulated line in the example above forms a unique symbol. However, these symbols are immediately i...

Precedence is how we answer the question: What operations should we perform first? Whether in solving mathematical equations or writing source code, strict procedural rules of precedence allow the same operations to produce the same results every time. The first rule of precedence in the C programming language (and many others) is that we always work from the inner-most parentheses out-ward. This is particularly important to remember during bug-testing. Adding parentheses can be a good debugging tactic, but it is bad form to litter your code with un-needed parentheses. The second rule is that when operators have equal priority, we simply solve from left to right. With simple arithmetic, precedence or order of operations conforms to PEMDAS - from first to last, in pairs: parentheses and  exponents, multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction. Multiplication and division share the same precedence in this scenario because, functionally, they are the same ...

Part 1 of our C Programming Tutorial covers the basics of compiling. What is a compiler? How does it work? How do I use a compiler to write programs in C? Every application that you write in C will have to be compiled. Furthermore, compilation errors and failures will be your first indication that you have made a mistake in your program somewhere. Understanding your compiler in and out will help you to write code much more efficiently.  For the purposes of our tutorial today, we will be discussing the clang compiler . clang is widely used - iOS developers should recognize it as the compiler used for developing iPhone apps as part of xCode and Apple's LLVM . I will also use a number of demonstrations; these demonstrations will include source code written in C, assembler and some garbage ASCII that is representative of machine code viewed through a text editor. For my part, I am using a Fedora Linux virtual machine for these demonstrations. That said, as I discussed initial...