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)

Measuring the clock ticks and CPU seconds required in the execution of a function

In this recipe, we will learn how to find out the clock ticks and CPU seconds that are required in the execution of a function. We will create a program that contains a function. This function will simply run a nested loop and we will find out the time required to run it. To do so, we will make use of the clock() function. 

The clock() function returns the processor time that is consumed by the program. Essentially, this time is dependent on the technique that the operating system uses in allocating the resources to the process. More precisely, the function returns the number of clock ticks elapsed from the time the program is invoked. The function does not require any parameters and returns either the processor time that is required in running certain statements or...