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 Security in Coding

While coding, sometimes you may use functions that don't check or constrain the data entered by the user. The user either may enter incorrect data or content that might be larger than the capacity of the receiving variable. In such a situation, a buffer overflow or segmentation fault may occur. Consequently, the program will give an erroneous output.

In this chapter, we will use the following recipes to see how we can error-proof the entering of data in a program:

  • Avoiding buffer overflow while reading strings from the keyboard
  • Writing secure code while copying strings
  • Avoiding errors while string formatting
  • Avoid vulnerabilities while accessing files in C