You've been introduced to a simple programming language in Python. Now let's introduce a more complex but powerful language called C. C is the original language of Linux and has been around for many decades but is still widely used by open source developers. It is similar to Python, but it is also a bit different, and since you may need to both understand and make changes to C code, you may need to be familiar with it and how it is used.
As with Python, you will need to have access to the language capabilities. These come in the form of a compiler and build system, which turns your text files that contain programs to machine code that the processor can actually execute. To do this, type sudo apt-get install build-essential. This will install the programs you need to turn your code into executables for the system.
Now...