Part 1. Acquaintance
Our mascot for this level, the common raven, is a very sociable corvid and known for its problem-solving capacity. Ravens organize in teams and have been observed playing even as adults.
This level will acquaint you with the C programming language: that is, it will provide you with enough knowledge to write and use good C programs. “Good” here refers to a modern understanding of the language, avoiding most of the pitfalls of early dialects of C, and offering you some constructs that were not present before and that are portable across the vast majority of modern computer architectures, from your cell phone to a mainframe computer. Having worked through these chapters, you should be able to write short code for everyday needs: not extremely sophisticated, but useful and portable.
In many ways, C is a permissive language; programmers are allowed to shoot themselves in the foot or other body parts if they choose to, and C will make no effort to stop them. Therefore, just for the moment, we will introduce some restrictions. We’ll try to avoid handing out guns in this level, and place the key to the gun safe out of your reach for the moment, marking its location with big and visible exclamation marks.