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)

Sorting and Searching

Searching, as the name suggests, is the process of locating a specific element in a group of elements. Searching can be broadly classified as one of the following two types:

  • Linear searching: Where each element in the list is sequentially searched to find the desired item.
  • Binary search: Where the list is assumed to already be sorted, and the middle value of the list is compared with the item to be searched to determine which half of the list needs to be considered for searching the item. The process of dividing the list continues until the item is found.

Sorting, on the other hand, is the procedure of arranging certain elements in a certain order. The order can be ascending, descending, or in another specific order. Not only can the individual numerals and strings be sorted, but even records can be sorted. Records are sorted on the...