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)

Summary

In this chapter, we started to discuss Unix and how it is interrelated with C. Even in non-Unix operating systems, you see some traces of a similar design to Unix systems.

As part of this chapter, we went through the history of the early 1970s and explained how Unix appeared from Multics and how C was derived from the B programming language. After that, we talked about the Unix architecture, an onion-like architecture that consists of four layers: user applications, the shell, the kernel, and hardware.

We briefly went over the various layers in the Unix onion model and provided detailed explanations of the shell layer. We introduced the C standard library and how it is used through POSIX and SUS standards to give programmers the ability to write programs that can be built on various Unix systems.

In the second part of our look into Unix, Chapter 11, System Calls and Kernels, we will continue our discussion about Unix and its architecture, and we will provide explanations...