Modern C PDF book

Book Description

This book teaches you to take your C programming skills to new heights, whether you're just starting out with C or have more extensive experience. Organized by level, this comprehensive guide lets you jump in where it suits you best while still reaping the maximum benefits.

The C programming language has been around for a long time - the canonical reference for it is the book written by its creators, Kernighan and Ritchie [1978]. Since then, C has been used in an incredible number of applications. Programs and systems written in C are all around us: in personal computers, phones, cameras, set-top boxes, refrigerators, cars, mainframes, satellites, basically in any modern device that has a programmable interface.

Table of contents

• Getting started
• Imperative programming
• Compiling and running
• The principal structure of a program
• Grammar
• Declarations
• Definitions
• Statements
• Warning to experienced C programmers
• Everything is about control
• Conditional execution
• Iterations
• Multiple selection
• Expressing computations
• Arithmetic
• Operators that modify objects
• Boolean context
• The ternary or conditional operator
• Evaluation order
• Basic values and data
• Basic types
• Specifying values
• Initializers
• Named constants
• Binary representions
• Aggregate data types
• Arrays
• Pointers as opaque types
• Structures
• New names for types: typedef
• Functions
• Simple functions
• main is special
• Recursion
• C Library functions
• Mathematics
• Input, output and file manipulation
• String processing and conversion
• Time
• Runtime environment settings
• Program termination and assertions
• Style
• Formatting
• Naming
• Organization and documentation
• Interface documentation
• Implementation
• Macros
• Pure functions
• Pointers
• Address-of and object-of operators
• Pointer arithmetic
• Pointers and structs
• Opaque structures
• Array and pointer access are the same
• Array and pointer parameters are the same
• Null pointers
• Function pointers
• The C memory model
• A uniform memory model
• Unions
• Memory and state
• Pointers to unspecific objects
• Implicit and explicit conversions
• Effective Type
• Alignment
• Allocation, initialization and destruction
• malloc and friends
• Storage duration, lifetime and visibility
• Initialization
• Digression: a machine model
• More involved use of the C library
• Text processing
• Formatted input
• Extended character sets
• Binary files
• Error checking and cleanup
• Performance
• Safety first
• Optimizers are good enough
• Help the compiler
• Inline functions
• Avoid aliasing: restrict qualifiers
• Measurement and inspection
• Functionlike macros
• how does it work
• Argument checking
• Accessing the calling context
• Variable length argument lists