Nested structures - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Working with Nested Structures in C

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple program to store information about books in a library. Each book has a title, an author, and a publication year. The author itself has a first name and a last name.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that uses nested structures to store and display information about a book and its author.

📋 What You'll Learn

Define a structure called Author with firstName and lastName as character arrays.

Define a structure called Book that contains a title character array, an Author structure, and an year integer.

Create a variable of type Book and assign exact values to all fields.

Print the book's title, author's full name, and publication year.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Nested structures are used to model complex data like books with authors, addresses with cities, or employees with departments.

💼 Career

Understanding nested structures is important for jobs involving C programming, embedded systems, and software that manages structured data.

1

Define the nested structures

Define a structure called Author with firstName and lastName as character arrays of size 50 each. Then define a structure called Book that contains a title character array of size 100, an Author structure called author, and an integer year.

C

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use struct keyword to define both Author and Book structures. Remember to include the nested Author inside Book.

2

Create a book variable and assign values

Create a variable called myBook of type struct Book. Assign the title as "The C Programming Language", the author's first name as "Brian", last name as "Kernighan", and the year as 1978. Use strcpy to copy strings.

C

#include 
#include 

struct Author {
    char firstName[50];
    char lastName[50];
};

struct Book {
    char title[100];
    struct Author author;
    int year;
};

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to include string.h for strcpy. Use dot notation to access nested fields.

3

Write code to print book details

Inside the main function, after assigning values, write printf statements to print the book's title, author's full name (first and last name separated by a space), and publication year on separate lines.

C

#include 
#include 

struct Author {
    char firstName[50];
    char lastName[50];
};

struct Book {
    char title[100];
    struct Author author;
    int year;
};

int main() {
    struct Book myBook;
    strcpy(myBook.title, "The C Programming Language");
    strcpy(myBook.author.firstName, "Brian");
    strcpy(myBook.author.lastName, "Kernighan");
    myBook.year = 1978;
    // Print the book details below
    // Your code here
    return 0;
}

Need a hint?

Use printf with format specifiers %s for strings and %d for integers. Access nested fields with dot notation.

4

Run the program and display output

Run the program and print the output exactly as shown:
Title: The C Programming Language
Author: Brian Kernighan
Year: 1978

C

#include 
#include 

struct Author {
    char firstName[50];
    char lastName[50];
};

struct Book {
    char title[100];
    struct Author author;
    int year;
};

int main() {
    struct Book myBook;
    strcpy(myBook.title, "The C Programming Language");
    strcpy(myBook.author.firstName, "Brian");
    strcpy(myBook.author.lastName, "Kernighan");
    myBook.year = 1978;
    printf("Title: %s\n", myBook.title);
    printf("Author: %s %s\n", myBook.author.firstName, myBook.author.lastName);
    printf("Year: %d\n", myBook.year);
    // Program output above
    // Your code here
    return 0;
}

Need a hint?

Make sure your printf statements match the expected output exactly, including spaces and new lines.