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)

Stack

A stack is a data structure where all insertions and deletions are performed at one end. The end at which insertions and deletions are performed is called the top of the stack (tos). The stack is also known as a pushdown list or Last In First Out (LIFO); that is, the last item that is added to the stack is added at the top of all earlier items and will be the first item to be taken out of the stack.

The operations that can be performed on the stack are as follows:

  • Push: This pushes the value onto the stack. Before pushing the value onto the stack, the value at the top is incremented to point at the new position where the new value can be pushed.
  • Pop: This pops or fetches the value from the stack. The value at the top or the value pointed at by the top is taken out of the stack.
  • Peep: This shows the value that is at the top of the stack, that is, the value that is pointed...