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)

General-Purpose Utilities

In this chapter, we are going to learn about the different functions that are used when performing different tasks. We will learn how to register functions that execute automatically when a program terminates. We will learn about functions that measure the clock ticks and CPU seconds required for the execution of certain tasks. We will also learn how to allocate memory at runtime, and then free it up when its task is over. Finally, we will learn how to handle different signals. 

In this chapter, we will dive into the following recipes:

  • Registering a function that is called when a program exits
  • Measuring the clock ticks and CPU seconds required in the execution of a function
  • Performing dynamic memory allocation
  • Handling signals

However, before we proceed, a small introduction to dynamic memory allocation and some related functions is in order...