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)

Hardware

The final purpose of every operating system is to allow the user and the applications to be able to use and interact with hardware. Unix also aims to provide access to the attached hardware in an abstract and transparent way, using the same set of utility programs and commands in all existing and future platforms.

By having this transparency and abstraction, Unix abstracts all of the different hardware to be a number of devices attached to a system. So, the term device is centric in Unix, and every connected piece of hardware is considered to be a device connected to the Unix system.

The hardware attached to a computer can be categorized into two different categories: mandatory and peripheral. The CPU and main memory are mandatory devices attached to a Unix system. All other hardware such as the hard drive, network adapter, mouse, monitor, graphics card, and Wi-Fi adapter, are peripheral devices.

A Unix machine cannot work without mandatory hardware, but you can have...