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)

Summary

Our initial goal in this chapter was to provide an overview of the memory structure of a process in a Unix-like operating system. As we have covered a lot in this chapter, take a minute to read through what we've been through, as you should now feel comfortable in understanding what we have accomplished:

  • We described the dynamic memory structure of a running process as well as the static memory structure of an executable object file.
  • We observed that the static memory layout is located inside the executable object file and it is broken into pieces which are called segments. We found out that the Text, Data, and BSS segments are part of the static memory layout.
  • We saw that the Text segment or Code segment is used to store the machine-level instructions meant to be executed when a new process is spawned out of the current executable object file.
  • We saw that the BSS segment is used to store global variables that are either uninitialized or set to...