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  • Book Overview & Buying Systems Programming with Zig
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Systems Programming with Zig

Systems Programming with Zig

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
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Systems Programming with Zig

Systems Programming with Zig

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Build reliable systems software with Zig through a project-driven approach focused on practical engineering challenges. Guided by UNIX systems engineer & bestselling author Mihalis Tsoukalos, you will learn modern systems programming techniques while creating production-ready applications, UNIX tools, & network services. This book takes you from essential UNIX tooling and build infrastructure to advanced topics such as direct memory access, binary formats, filesystem monitoring, networking, concurrency, asynchronous I/O, & database integration. Through hands-on projects, you will create command-line utilities, TCP and UDP services, HTTP applications, file indexing tools, cache servers, & a domain-specific language interpreter that combines memory management, comptime metaprogramming, parsing, evaluation, & error handling. Each chapter demonstrates how Zig features solve practical systems programming problems. You will work with memory management, process control, synchronization primitives, event-driven architectures, SQLite integration, protocol design, & performance-focused data structures while learning the reasoning behind key engineering decisions. By the end of this book, you will be able to build efficient and maintainable systems software in Zig & confidently apply the language to production projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
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1
Part 1: Zig Foundations
6
Part 2: Systems Programming in Practice
17
Index

5

Navigating Directories and Filesystem Events

Modern Systems Programming demands a delicate balance between high-level abstraction and granular control over hardware resources, a philosophy that lies at the heart of the Zig programming language. Zig provides the primitives necessary to interact directly with the underlying data structures and event notifications of the operating system. This chapter explores the mechanics of navigating directories and managing files, moving beyond basic I/O to address the technical realities of modern filesystems. We will begin by implementing basic tasks before constructing a directory tree visualizer, ztree, which requires an understanding of recursive traversal and the handling of edge cases like cyclic symbolic links. From there, the focus shifts to real-time interaction through zwatch, a file-monitoring utility that leverages platform-specific primitives such as Linux inotify or BSD kqueue. Finally, the chapter concludes with the implementation...

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Programming languages
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Systems Programming with Zig
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