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)

Preprocessor

At the very start of this book in Chapter 1, Essential Features, we introduced, albeit briefly, the concepts of C preprocessor. Specifically, we talked there about macros, conditional compilation, and header guards.

You will remember that at the beginning of the book, we discussed C preprocessing as an essential feature of the C language. Preprocessing is unique due to the fact that it cannot be easily found in other programming languages. In the simplest terms, preprocessing allows you to modify your source code before sending it for compilation. At the same time, it allows you to divide your source code, especially the declarations, into header files so that you can later include them into multiple source files and reuse those declarations.

It is vital to remember that if you have a syntax error in your source code, the preprocessor will not find the error as it does not know anything about the C syntax. Instead, it will just perform some easy tasks, which typically...