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)

Using assertions to ensure a pointer is not pointing to NULL

Let's perform one more recipe on assertions. Let's apply assertions to ensure that a pointer is not pointing to NULL and is instead pointing to a memory address that is to be accessed. Essentially, in this recipe, we will learn to compute the average of a few numbers, where the numbers are stored in an array, and the array elements are accessed through a pointer.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to ensure that the pointer is not NULL and is pointing to a memory address by making use of assertions:

  1. Define an array containing a number of integers whose average is to be computed:
int arr[]={3,9,1,6,2};
  1. Set a pointer to point to the array...