As an aspiring C programmer, is there anywhere I can read about interesting applications of the switch statement? Pretty much everything I've learned has come with neat little break;s and default at the end of each case.
The remaining 0% is stuff like Duff's Device.
Any context where you would want "if x == this, goto here; if x == that, goto there" is a potential place to use the switch statement. Duff's device is a good example, but there are many things that can be built this way.
Only if "here" and "there" are later on in the same block.
As an developer who has written a lot of shipping code in C and C++ for almost 30 years, I would strongly advise you to write your switch statements in as straightforward a way as possible. If you use fall through, place very noticeable /* FALL THROUGH */ comments to indicate that you meant to do that. If you wind up doing some kind of oddball thing because you _have confirmed_ that it results in significantly better optimization for a specific hardware target and compiler, comment the crap out of that, maybe make it conditional with an #if block, and (what I prefer to do is) write the simple version too, test both versions, and keep the simple version as a comment, so a future maintainer can verify that the complicated code is doing what you intended.