Book Image

Practical C Programming

By : B. M. Harwani
Book Image

Practical C Programming

By: B. M. Harwani

Overview of this book

Used in everything from microcontrollers to operating systems, C is a popular programming language among developers because of its flexibility and versatility. This book helps you get hands-on with various tasks, covering the fundamental as well as complex C programming concepts that are essential for making real-life applications. You’ll start with recipes for arrays, strings, user-defined functions, and pre-processing directives. Once you’re familiar with the basic features, you’ll gradually move on to learning pointers, file handling, concurrency, networking, and inter-process communication (IPC). The book then illustrates how to carry out searching and arrange data using different sorting techniques, before demonstrating the implementation of data structures such as stacks and queues. Later, you’ll learn interesting programming features such as using graphics for drawing and animation, and the application of general-purpose utilities. Finally, the book will take you through advanced concepts such as low-level programming, embedded software, IoT, and security in coding, as well as techniques for improving code performance. By the end of this book, you'll have a clear understanding of C programming, and have the skills you need to develop robust apps.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Creating minimum spanning trees using Kruskal's algorithm

In this recipe, we will learn how to make a minimum spanning tree using Kruskal's algorithm. 

A minimum/minimal spanning tree of an undirected graph is a tree that is formed from graph edges that connect all of the vertices of the graph at the lowest total cost. A minimum spanning tree can exist if, and only if, the graph is connected. A graph is said to be connected if there exists a path between any two vertices.

Here, the nodes of the graph are initially considered as n distinct partial trees with one node each. At each step of the algorithm, two distinct partial trees are connected into a single partial tree by an edge of the graph. When only one partial tree exists (for instance, after n-1 such steps), it is a minimum spanning tree.

The connecting arc of minimum cost is used to connect two distinct...