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)

Introduction to assembly coding

The x86 processors have eight 32-bit general-purpose registers. The names of some of these general-purpose registers are EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. These registers can be used in subsections. For example, the least significant 2 bytes of EAX can be used as a 16-bit register called AX. Again, the least significant byte of AX can be used as an 8-bit register called AL and the most significant byte of AX can be used as an 8-bit register called AH. Similarly, the BX register can be used in the form of the BH and BL registers, and so on.

We will be writing inline assembly code in this chapter because this code is easily integrated with C code during code generation. Consequently, the C and assembly code is optimized by the compiler to produce efficient object code.

The syntax for using inline assembly code is as follows:

asm [volatile] (
asm statements
:...