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)

Avoiding a deadlock

A deadlock can be avoided if the threads are allowed to acquire the locks in a sequence. Let's suppose that a thread acquires the lock for a resource and wants to acquire the lock for a second resource. Any other thread that tries to acquire the first lock will be asked to wait, as it was already acquired by the first thread. Therefore, the second thread will not be able to acquire the lock for the second resource either, since it can only acquire locks in a sequence. However, our first thread will be allowed to acquire the lock to the second resource without waiting.

Applying a sequence to the locking of resources is the same as allowing only one thread to acquire resources at a time. The other threads will only be able to acquire the resources after the previous thread is over. This way, we will not have a deadlock on our hands.

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