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)

From Source to Binary

In programming, everything starts with source code. In reality, source code, which sometimes goes by the other name of the code base, usually consists of a number of text files. Within that, each of those text files contains textual instructions written in a programming language.

We know that a CPU cannot execute textual instructions. The reality is that these instructions should first be compiled (or translated) to machine-level instructions in order to be executed by a CPU, which eventually will result in a running program.

In this chapter, we go through the steps needed to get a final product out of C source code. This chapter goes into the subject in great depth, and as such we've split it into five distinct sections:

  1. The standard C compilation pipeline: In the first section, we are going to cover standard C compilation, the various steps in the pipeline, and how they contribute to producing the final product from C source...