Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (1)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (1)
By: Kamran Amini

Overview of this book

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Unix – History and Architecture

You might have asked yourself why there should be a chapter about Unix in the middle of a book about expert-level C. If you have not, I invite you to ask yourself, how can these two topics, C and Unix, be related in such a way that there's a need for two dedicated chapters (this and the next chapter) in the middle of a book that should talk about C?

The answer is simple: if you think they are unrelated, then you are making a big mistake. The relationship between the two is simple; Unix is the first operating system that is implemented with a fairly high-level programming language, C, which is designed for this purpose, and C got its fame and power from Unix. Of course, our statement about C being a high-level programming language is not true anymore, and C is no longer considered to be so high-level.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, if the Unix engineers at Bell Labs had decided to use another programming language, instead of C, to develop...