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)

What is a stack?

A Stack is a structure that can be implemented with arrays as well as linked lists. It is a sort of a bucket where the value you enter will be added at the bottom. The next item that you add to a stack will be kept just above the item that was added previously. The procedure of adding a value to the stack is called a push operation and the procedure of getting a value out of the stack is called a pop operation. The location where the value can be added or taken out of the stack is pointed at by a pointer called top. The value of the top pointer is -1 when the stack is empty:

Figure 3.1

When the push operation is executed, the value of top is incremented by 1, so that it can point to the location in the stack where the value can be pushed:

Figure 3.2

Now, the next value that will be pushed will be kept above value 1. More precisely, the...