Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (2)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (2)
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)

Shell interface to user applications

A human user either uses a Terminal or a specific GUI program such as a web browser to use the functionalities available on a Unix system. Both are referred to as user applications, or just simply applications or programs, that allow the hardware to be used through the shell ring. Memory, CPU, network adapter, and hard drives are typical examples of hardware that are usually used by most Unix programs through the API provided by the shell ring. The API provided is one of the topics that we are going to talk about.

From a developer's perspective, there is not much difference between an application and a program. But from a human user's perspective, an application is a program that has a means such as a Graphical User interface (GUI) or Command-Line Interface (CLI) to interact with the user, but a program is a piece of software running on a machine that has no UI, such as a running service. This book does not distinguish...