Extreme C

Book excerpt: Push the limits of what C - and you - can do, with this high-intensity guide to the most advanced capabilities of C Key FeaturesMake the most of C’s low-level control, flexibility, and high performanceA comprehensive guide to C’s most powerful and challenging featuresA thought-provoking guide packed with hands-on exercises and examplesBook Description There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level. What you will learnBuild advanced C knowledge on strong foundations, rooted in first principlesUnderstand memory structures and compilation pipeline and how they work, and how to make most out of themApply object-oriented design principles to your procedural C codeWrite low-level code that’s close to the hardware and squeezes maximum performance out of a computer systemMaster concurrency, multithreading, multi-processing, and integration with other languagesUnit Testing and debugging, build systems, and inter-process communication for C programmingWho this book is for Extreme C is for C programmers who want to dig deep into the language and its capabilities. It will help you make the most of the low-level control C gives you.