The second week will describe flow control and loops (book chapter 4, 5). After we learn how to write a program to perform basic computation in the first week, we start to learn the control structure of a program. We will learn how to control the execution of a program among several possible "next steps", and how to repeat the computation to finish repetitive tasks. We will also describe certain loop ending practice, which strongly relates to programming style.

The third week describes arrays and floating point numbers (book chapter 6, 7). We will introduce ways to organize related data into the most basic data structure, i.e., array. We will describe the circumstance of using an array, and the most useful idioms in using them. Various examples will be introduced to enforce the concepts in using array correctly. We will also describe the concept of floating point numbers, which is different from the integers we introduce at the beginning of this course.

The fourth will will describe the concept of functions (book chapter 8). We will motivate the use of function by system functions, including mathematic and input/output functions, so we the students can understand the key concept that if we can use existing code, then we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Then we will introduce the way to define our own functions. The key mechanism of function call, parameter passing, and return values wiill be discussed by a series of examples.

In the fifth week we will describe pointers (book chapter 9). We will focus on the semantic of pointers and then introduce the mechanism of using pointers. Here we would like to tie together the pointer concept with memory layout, i.e., the way the computer system places variables into memory. After the introduction of memory layout the students will have a very clear idea on how a computer system manages the memory, and how this layout affects the way we write program that handles variables of different types in C.

The sixth week will describe strings and characters (book chapter 10, 11). Up to this point in this course we deal with only numeric data. Now we are ready to introduce character and string that deal with mainly text data. We will introduce the concept of memory bits, and different types in C only means different ways to interpret the memory bits. We start with character, which is the basic unit of text information. Then we introduce string as an array of characters, and various useful functions to perform various operations on strings.