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)

Implementing a circular linked list

In this recipe, we will learn how to implement a circular linked list. The difference between a linear linked list and a circular linked list is that where the last node of the linear linked list points at NULL, the pointer of the last node in a circular linked list points back to the first node, hence allowing the pointer to traverse in a backward direction too.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to implement a circular linked list:

  1. Define a structure called node. To store data in a circular linked list, define a data member in the node structure. Besides a data member, define a pointer that will point at the next node.
  2. A pointer called startList is initialized to NULL. The startList pointer...