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)

What is a build system?

Put simply, a build system is a set of programs and companion text files that collectively build a software code base. Nowadays, every programming language has its own set of build systems. For instance, in Java, you have Ant, Maven, Gradle, and so on. But what does "building a code base" mean?

Building a code base means producing final products from source files. For example, for a C code base, the final products can be executable files, shared object files, or static libraries, and the goal of a C build system is to produce these products out of the C source files found in the code base. The details of the operations needed for this purpose depend heavily on the programming language or the languages involved in the code base.

Many modern build systems, especially in projects written in a JVM language such as Java or Scala, provide an extra service.

They do dependency management as well. This means that the build system detects the dependencies...