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)

Learning how to avoid a buffer overflow 

In the previous recipe, we defined two structure variables because we wanted to show that if data entered is larger in size than the member field allows, it will result in ambiguous output; and if data is entered within the capacity of the receiving variables, it will generate the correct output.

In the following recipe, we don't need two structure variables as we will be using the fgets function to address our concern. This function never results in a buffer overflow. 

How to do it...

Here are the steps for avoiding a buffer overflow using the fgets function:

  1. Define a structure consisting of two members, name and orderid.
  2. Define a variable of the structure type defined...