Quote Originally Posted by gabeperron
in college i used visual studio and i have heard codeblocks could be good.
They are both IDEs that come bundled with different compilers. You could go with what you're familiar with, though you might need a newer version of Visual Studio to have a C compiler that is more C99 compliant.

Quote Originally Posted by gabeperron
Furthermore, maybe someone could send me some basic text files for c codes i could practice and manipulate.
You could start with the good old "hello world" program, add in some basic standard I/O, and then implement some of the common introductory searching and sorting algorithms and data structures for practice. Reading a file of a flexible number of records into a dynamic array could help you revise malloc/realloc/free; creating and manipulating linked lists and binary trees could be good to get your head around pointers again.

Quote Originally Posted by gabeperron
Eventually plan to make a code with a menu system with for tracking inventory. With saving and writing to disk option.
Learn to use SQLite: it will provide inspiration for your own future C API design and push you learn about SQL and relational database design if you don't already know them.