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)

Single-host communication

In this section, we are going to talk about single-host IPC. Multiple-host IPC will be the subject of our discussion in the next chapter. There are four main techniques that can be used by processes to communicate when they reside on the same machine:

  • POSIX signals
  • POSIX pipes
  • POSIX message queues
  • Unix domain sockets

POSIX signals, unlike the other preceding techniques, don't create a communication channel between the processes, but can be used as a way to notify a process about an event. In certain scenarios, such signals can be used by processes to notify each other about specific events in the system.

Before jumping to the first IPC technique, POSIX signals, let's discuss file descriptors. Other than POSIX signals, no matter which IPC technique you use, you will be dealing with file descriptors of some sort. Therefore, we'll now dedicate a separate section to them and discuss them further.

File descriptors...