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)

Applying loop unrolling for faster results

In this recipe, we will learn to print the sum of a sequence of numbers from 1 to a limit entered by the user using the loop unrolling technique. Loop unrolling means reducing or removing the loops from the program to reduce overheads applied while running the loops. Basically, for running a loop, the operating system has to manage two overheads – the first overhead is to maintain the count of the loop and the second overhead is to do conditional branching. Loop unrolling helps in avoiding these two overheads. Let's see how.

How to do it…

The steps for finding the sum of the first n sequence of numbers using the loop unrolling technique are as follows:

  1. The...