Modern C Up and Running: A Programmer's Guide to Finding Fluency and Bypassing the Quirks

Learn how to program in modern C, from the basics through the advanced topics required for proficiency. This book is the fastest path to C fluency for anyone experienced in a general-purpose programming language.

From start to finish, code examples highlight the idioms and best practices behind efficient, robust programs in a variety of areas. The book opens with a thorough coverage of syntax, built-in data types and operations, and program structure. C has quirks and presents challenges, which are covered in detail. The coverage of advanced features is what sets this book apart from others. Among the advanced topics covered are floating-point representation in the IEEE 754 standard; embedded assembly language in C code for overflow detection; regular expressions, assertions, and internationalization; WebAssembly through C; and software libraries for C and other clients.

Memory efficiency and safety are the two major challenges in C programming, and you’ll explore these challenges through a series of C examples. Arrays and structures, which are the means to high-level data representation, are covered in connection with pointers, which provide efficiency. The book again uses code examples in covering networking and wire-level security; concurrency (multiprocessing and multithreading); instruction-level parallelism; and interprocess communication through shared memory and files, pipes, message queues, and signals.

Many books introduce C, but few also explain how to use it properly and optimally. Essential C does just that.

What You'll Learn

• Accelerate your path to C mastery with this book for experienced programmers
• Refresh your approach to program structure and data types
• Dive into aggregates and pointers using modern C language
• Revisit storage classes and scope
• Dive into concurrency (multiprocessing and multithreading) and instruction-level parallelism
• Finish with regular expressions, assertions, signals, locales and more

Who This Book Is For

Professional programmers or software developers who has prior experience with C or in general wanting an accelerated learning guide to modern C programming language.

About the Author

Martin Kalin has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is a professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. He has co-written a series of books on C and C++ and written a book on Java for programmers. He enjoys commercial programming and has co-developed large distributed systems in process scheduling and product configuration.