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)

Introducing concurrency

Concurrency simply means having multiple pieces of logic within a program being executed simultaneously. Modern software systems are often concurrent, as programs need to run various pieces of logic at the same time. As such, concurrency is something that every program today is using to a certain extent.

We can say that concurrency is a powerful tool that lets you write programs that can manage different tasks at the same time, and the support for it usually lies in the kernel, which is at the heart of the operating system.

There are numerous examples in which an ordinary program manages multiple jobs simultaneously. For example, you can surf the web while downloading files. In this case, tasks are being executed in the context of the browser process concurrently. Another notable example is in a video streaming scenario, such as when you are watching a video on YouTube. The video player might be in the middle of downloading future chunks...