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)

When to use concurrency

Based on our explanations given so far, it seems that having only one task is less problematic than having multiple tasks do the same thing concurrently. This is quite right; if you can write a program that runs acceptably without introducing concurrency, it is highly recommended that you do so. There are some general patterns we can use to know when we have to use concurrency.

In this section, we are going to walk through what these general patterns are, and how they lead us to split a program into concurrent flows.

A program, regardless of the programming language used, is simply a set of instructions that should be executed in sequence. In other words, a given instruction won't be executed until the preceding instruction has been executed. We call this concept a sequential execution. It doesn't matter how long the current instruction takes to finish; the next instruction must wait until the current one has been completed. It is usually said...