C Programming Beginner’s Guide — Part II: Binary, Compilers and IDEs
Welcome to Part II of my series on C Programming. Part I was a general introduction to Computer Programming without much regard to the C language and thus is not a prerequisite for this article, but if you wish to skim through it, you can do that here.
In the last article I talked about the need to learn a computer language in order to communicate with it. It turns out that computers speak and understand only ONE language — Binary which consists of just two states: —1 and 0. The Binary 1 represents the ON / TRUE logic or state, while 0 represents OFF / FALSE logic.
Combinations of these 1s and 0s make the simplest of strings to the most complex of data in today’s digital world.
However, we humans don’t like to write code in binary, because its not easily understandable. Therefore we write our code in a language like C that is easy to understand, and then we convert our C code into machine code. But how?
Compilers
Compilers are programs that interpret and understand our high-level code (such as in C) and then convert it into much low-level binary (or machine code) that is easily understandable by computers. Thus they act as a bridge between us and machine-level instructions. Compilers usually process our source code file one line at a time, and generate its equivalent machine instructions. The steps involved in compilation require an article of their own, so for now this high-level view will suffice.
IDEs
The main set of tools you need to start programming in C (and any major programming language) are a text editor (to type your code into) and a compiler. However to ease the programmer, many Integrated Development Environments (IDE) are available, which are development tools that have a text editor (and a compiler) integrated together in one software. The most popular ones for C/C++ programming are Microsoft Visual Studio (on Windows and Mac OS), JetBrains CLion (Cross-platform), Eclipse (Cross-platform) and Dev-C++ (Windows). You can choose any one of these, but I recommend Visual Studio as it is easy to use and incorporates advanced debugging features.
You can download the IDE of your choice from here:
Once you’ve downloaded and installed your IDE, it is pretty straightforward how to set up a New Project in it. But if you still need help, I recommend going through the basic tutorial on using the IDE given on their respective websites, before we can proceed with learning the C Programming Language. Till then, good luck. See you in Part III of this series!
