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Introduction

Welcome to Intro to C on Windows. This book accompanies the C source code in the IntroToC folder: a sequence of small Visual Studio projects (Intro, lab1, Part2–Part11, and a few optional extras). Each chapter points at the relevant project so you can read, build, and experiment.

Important

GitHub Classroom

  1. Open the assignment: Accept the GitHub Classroom assignment.
  2. Sign in to GitHub if prompted, then accept the assignment so a personal repository is created for you.
  3. Watch for the invitation / acknowledgement email from GitHub (or your course) and complete any steps it asks for.
  4. Clone your Classroom repository to your machine (HTTPS or SSH, as your instructor prefers) and open the solution or projects from there when doing homework.

Warning

The “Feedback” pull request

The Feedback pull request in your repo is for the instructor to leave comments and suggestions. Do not merge or close it. Keep doing your work on main (or the branch your instructor specifies) and push regularly. New commits on main will show up for review; the Feedback PR is a conversation surface, not something to finish like a normal feature branch.

What you need

  • Windows and Visual Studio (or another build setup that can compile Windows C projects with the Windows SDK).
  • Many later labs use x64 only: several projects use __readgsqword to read the TEB/PEB and will fail to compile in 32-bit (x86) configurations by design.
  • Basic familiarity with a terminal, Git, and cloning/pushing to GitHub.

How this book is organized

Chapters follow the same order as the parts in IntroToC, from numeric types and printf through pointers, structs, the module list, PE basics, threads and file search, and WinINet HTTP. Later optional material covers intrinsics and low-level patterns.

Repository layout (reference)

LocationPurpose
IntroToC/C lab projects. This book covers .c / .h work only—ignore sibling folders that are clearly C++ (e.g. FormatArgs, StructsWithUnions) or build output under x64/ unless your instructor says otherwise.
IntroToCBook/This mdBook (what you are reading).

When instructions say “open the Part3 project,” that means the folder IntroToC/Part3/ (and its .vcxproj in the solution).

Conventions

  • Snippets are shortened when helpful; the full source is always in IntroToC.
  • Windows types such as DWORD, ULONG, PCHAR, and UNICODE_STRING come from Windows.h and related headers.
  • ERROR_SUCCESS is a common “success” return for Win32-style main examples in this codebase.

Next chapter: Windows types, main, and printf (Intro + lab1).