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)

Performing conditional compilation with directives

In this recipe, we will learn how to apply conditional compilation. We will define certain macros, and then, by applying the #if, #ifdef, #ifndef, #else, #elif, #endif, and #undef preprocessor directives, we will direct the compiler to compile the desired code. Considering the example of a bookstore, let's assume that a user is asked to enter the price of the book. The program will apply different discounts, festival offers, a discount coupon, and Kindle options on the basis of the Qty macro, which represents the quantity or number of books purchased by the user. The program also defines other macros that determine different offers that are applicable.

How to do it...

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